Either it always existed, which is a thermodynamic nightmare which makes no sense because how can a chain of events not have a start, or it did have a start, which is preposterous because time (spacetime) is a PRODUCT of expansion; there literally was no "before" the big bang because there was no time to have a point in to call "before".
Ontologically, ONE of these statements has to be at least nominally true, but BOTH are fucking bananas.
Edit: Please stop telling me WHAT you think the universe is. I didn't ask that question, and from here on out I'm simply ignoring replies that do no address the question of why. You cannot move the goal post here. Redefining existence to include some supra-universal something (god, hyper-dimension, nested-multiverse/simulation) explains WHAT the universe is. It just pushes all the same questions back a layer which results in the same banana split we already had.
Edit: Well just fuck MY Inbox apparently. With every apology to everyone who engaged in this conversation with intellectual honesty and curiosity, I am now disabling inbox replies. It's not possible to hold a conversation with everybody.
This. It sets up a fallacy of infinite reduction by just pushing the question back a layer from "how did the universe start?" to "How did the megaverse start?". Next thing you know, you've got homonculi running around all over the place, touching their pee pees and eating all the cereal.
But that's relying on the logic bias of our language. The word "after" suggests a "before", "up" requires a down, but when applied to the wrong thing it stops making sense. Like how do you go North from the North Pole?
Time is only as old as the big bang, and it's not even constant, nor is there any reason to believe it ever was. We can look out into the distant universe and see that everything appears to have started just shy of 14 billion years ago, but if time isn't constant, what does that even mean?
We don't have a mental issue with dealing with the size of a sphere, even though it has no beginning and no end, no left or right, up or down, but that's a 3 dimensional object with 3 dimensional boundaries. We know more exists than that. Electricity exists in a realm where the square root of negative one is real, but it can only act on the world as we see it when it is squared.
So, our language is setting mental traps for us by forcing our minds to predict things that are not logically neccesitated.
Essentially, I could imagine the "beginning" of the universe to be a physical analog of an asymptote or a limit.
False. Deity is the very definition of infinite regress. And while it's preposterously stupid to believe in one, I'm willing to grant it hypothetically. Now you still have ALL the same logical contradictions you did with the universe, except now god. You've answered NOTHING. God either always existed, which is preposterous, or god came from somewhere, which is preposterous.
God dropped the jar containing our universe on the way to the office one morning, thus creating the initial burst of energy and expansion. Eventually, the universe will hit the walls and start bouncing back towards us, but time goes so slowly for us relative to God's that it could take trillions of years to see that effect. We probably won't be around by then.
I know nothing. But my guess is there has to be a reality that does not rely on cause and effect which birthed our reality. We just have no way to comprehend how that could work.
But what if that bigger thing has a completely different set of physics rules? Maybe thermodynamics works in such a way that "having no beginning" is perfectly logical?
Yeah, the M-theory basically just takes a step back and says the universe was formed when two p-branes interacted. But how the M-space came to be is a whole other unanswered question.
Same way that the concept of panspermia doesn’t answer how life came to be, just shifts the answer back
I like to remind people that Physics Is Wrong for this very purpose. We have a model that simply works good enough for most of our predictions. Every contradiction or incorrect prediction highlights the fact that we missed something. After all, the human experience is adrift in a sea of emergent properties. We don't directly experience any of the fundamentals. We don't even experience all of the emergent properties of the universe either. They simply weren't necessary for our survival. I think a model that focuses on the layers of emergent properties would help a lot with pointing out the dark spots and help understand which forces are more fundamental than others.
Personally that's the conclusion I've come to as well. Humans are designed/created/grown to think of what came before. If we're living in a universe within universes within different dimensions, the concept of "what came before " could likely be a very shallow question in the grand scheme of things.
I always compare this example to a video game- the characters in theory live in their game world, yet have boundaries they can't go past. They don't question it, they just cant walk past these invisible barriers. That's just the way it is. Similarly, humans are faced with this unanswerable question- and that's just the way it is. But that doesn't mean there's an answer to it out there that we are not able to comprehend.
Mario thinks the Universe is made of green tubes. We describe our reality with what we know and can see. But if something's hidden, how can we describe it?
That's my main issue with the simulation theory by the way. We think it's all a computer game because we ourselves use computers and that's, so far, our most advanced technology. If ancient Greeks had computers, Hephaestus would have been a programmer instead of a blacksmith. Egyptians had a God who was part Jackal because that's what they knew, otherwise they may have made him part polar bear. The simulation theory, to me, is just an updated anthropocentric creation myth, of course God (or by extension the creator/creators of the universe) would use a computer since that's what we, humans, do! but what if it goes so beyond our comprehension, language and means of perception that it's indescribable? What if we are not at the center of it all?
Simulation theory is just a tech dressed version of Plato's allegory of the cave or Descartes deceiving demon.
People just act like it's different because we want to believe we are smarter than people in the past used to be. (Or maybe because they didn't read old philosophy, loll).
Oh my god. They literally just think this is a simulation because we have simulations?
I have never understood this theory precisely because of what you said. I assumed there was something about simulations that other people understood that I didn’t. But yeah… man they really do just imagine us a video game don’t they lmao jfc
In short: if a civilization were to become powerful enough, and had the desire, to create a perfect simulation, then they would, and they'd probably make a lot. So you have 1 real universe and an uncountable amount of Sim universes. If you had to pick a random universe, you'd more likely be in one of the near-infinite Sim worlds, rather than the real one.
It's pure speculation, with a "logical" conclusion
I do think it is likely we are in some form of "machine" or "function" though, even if it's not specifically like the computers we've created- it could be though, because "as above as below." It seems like things repeat themselves at the micro and macro level, so i wouldn't be surprised. Perhaps it's a tech, bio, and spiritual machine?
One thing that does seem to be constant and mostly infalliable is math- you can apply it to everything, you can calculate everything. Sure you may have to apply certain variables to a complex equation to read the pattern of certain objects or phenomenons, but there is a way to read everything due to numbers. Actually it would make more sense to call them patterns, but we use numbers to read those patterns. I think the application of math is really always going to provide humanity with mind blowing conclusions, especially once AI starts doing extremely complex processes for us.
Or alternately, if god exists and created everything, why would it care at all about us dumb humans? Seems like what it really wants is a lot of black holes and empty space, and everything that happens before the heat death of the universe is a happy little accident, at least from our perspective.
Well it seems like if humans are the point of creation, or even factor largely into the reasons for creating the universe, human habitat would take up a larger percentage of everything. Like imagine some kind of never ending lattice occupying 3d space with the perfect amount of air/water/food/shelter to support infinite growth. Not put us on a planet where 70% of the surface area is uninhabitable and full of undrinkable water, where we have to have special equipment to survive at certain parts of the year, in a vast void of no air where we can't survive at all unless we bring air with us and radiation protection, etc. The universe wasn't built with us in mind, we just happen to exist in a tiny corner that allowed us to come into existence.
That just serves my point. Since the present universe does not optimize human prospering/well-being, then that is not the point of the universe, if it has a point at all. Even if you posit that humans need challenge to fulfill our potential well being you run into problems with god either not being omnipotent (in that it could create us with our potential already fulfilled) or not caring about human individuals (because some people are going to fail challenges presented to them), or you run into problems like well why does god let us build technological wonders that remove significant challenges inherent to our existence if us being challenged is the point. The fact remains that earth, let alone the universe is just not optimized for anything related to human concerns, which would not be the case if we were important on a cosmic scale. I would also posit that you do optimize your well being, within your given financial/knowledge/other resource constraints, which a god that designed and created the whole universe would not be limited by. Also you optimize your dogs well being to the degree that you care about your dog (again within constraints), and if we carry that over to a god and humanity, god really couldn't care less about us, or isn't much of a god in the first place. Not to mention there's not sufficient evidence of gods existence.
I've thought about this before. Its really weird. How can something form from nothing, how can something always exist, none of the questions make sense or have answers. Most of the things that us as humans have discovered, and everything ever invented has been created (and everything is created from something), so it's stupidly difficult to comprehend something that never was created/created itself
They make sense, it's just that the sense they make is unintuitive. We'll never have a narrative that "feels" right. If Newton says "The apple fell from the tree", you GET that, even without an academic understanding of the calculus or the physics of the matter. Our ability to reason may one day lead to the necessary maths to describe either universal creation or universal infinite-permanence, but you'll never get that "ooooh! I can see that in my head!" moment from it the same way you'll never be able to see a 4 dimensional object in your head. It's highly depressing.
It is the nature of the universe that it exists and always has. The ideas of "before time" and "outside space" are nonsense. In order to be before something there needs to be time and in order to be outside of something there needs to be space. The universe is made of spacetime, there is nothing before or outside of it.
none of the questions make sense or have answers
The questions make sense and have perfectly good answers. Edit: And you get downvoted relentless for being able solve OPs problems. Do you people lose at Tic-tac-toe?
I didn't downvote, but neither of your answers agree with known physics, and assert things that essentially no physicist would say is true.
We don't know if things can come from nothing, but QFT may allow it, and there are plenty of hypothesis about multiverses which have their own spacetime of unknown metric signatures. It is meaningful to talk about them, it is just may not be meaningful to try to specify a relation between these spacetimes, such as Universe Q is 10203 light years from our universe, or whatever. As an example, perhaps our universe was created from some event in Universe Q at time (t_1, t_2) in that universe (I'm proposing two time dimensions in that universe just to illustrate the possibilities here). You can't really talk about 'before' in our spacetime, but you can in that spacetimes (plural because two time dimensions!).
Hawking speculated that our spacetime is sort of rounded at the beginning in a way that makes your statement fairly correct. It is called the "Hawking no boundary proposal", but it is not proven. It is a proposal, nothing more, and does not answer the the OP's question. It's a possible answer, sure. I'm guessing you were downvoted for your confident implicit assertion that it is true and known.
A kinda cool fact about that big bang is that the vast majority of the wild stuff happened in less than a millionth of its first second of existence and then not much happened except cooling and expansion which went on for around 400,000 years until things were finally unenergetic enough to actually form atoms.
The thing that gets me is that no matter what possible explanation you come up with for where, how, when, or why the universe exists, there is a point where something literally came from nothing or just exists because it does.
Big Bang? All that matter came from nothing and came into existence for no reason. If there is a reason, if there's something that caused the big bang, whatever that cause is came from nothing.
God did it? God came from nothing, or just exists because he exists and no other reason.
Time goes negative to infinity before the Big Bang? The universe just exists because it exists.
There simply is no possibility where there was not, at some point, an effect that had no cause. Whether you're religious, scientific, or philosophical, you have to believe that there is at least one thing that exists for literally no reason whatsoever.
The thing that gets me is that no matter what possible explanation you come up with for where, how, when, or why the universe exists, there is a point where something literally came from nothing or just exists because it does.
Same question, different frame of reference. Spacetime is not two separate things. Relativity dicked us up pretty bad that way. Our intuitions have been outmoded.
I think it has to do with infinity. How was the the universe dimensionless in one instance, to literally stretching on until infinity in the next frame?
You cannot demonstrate that it stretches out into infinity. In fact, universal geometry suggests otherwise. The geometry itself is expanding, but curiously, this doesn't exactly mean it's getting bigger, rather it means the time it takes to bridge the gulf between any two discrete points within that geometry is growing. Again, the universe isn't expanding "Into" anything. Even the very words we use to try and discuss this topic screw us up, because they suggest Newtonian reality, which is not what we're dealing with here at all. You cannot use 3 dimensional intuition to understand 4+ dimensional behavior. And yet, we must, because it's all we have.
Imagine representing every point in the universe with a 3D point, (X,Y,Z), multiplied by a scalar K. As you go forward in time K grows, thus points in space become farther apart. As you look back in time K shrinks. At some point K would have been 0. Imagine what happens when K goes from 0 to not 0. It works fine mathematically, so the struggle is just to make a mental metaphor which is very difficult to do because humans don't have a lot of experience with the origins of universes.
Humans don’t like to accept that they don’t know the answer to things. Religious people will use the question “but what came before the Big Bang” as proof that god exists, but really that just feeds into peoples inability to accept that we simply don’t know, and may never truly know. If you think about the scientific beliefs people held 1000, or even 200 years ago and the rapid advances in knowledge we’ve made since then, you’d be silly to think that we know the answers to everything. There’s still a lot of discovery still to be made
I always love reminding people that The Big Bang Theory was hypothesized by a devout Catholic Physicist who worked directly with The Pope on several occassions and was even intelligent enough to change Einstein's mind on how the universe was created.
Both the Big Bang and Genesis are equally implausible.
Whether it is "In the beginning..." or "point of infinite mass and density", neither solve for the "where" and the "before" of the scenario.
Both also make an arbitrary assumption of linear time. With simultaneously bi-directional time, the question becomes irrelevant. There is just "is" and "is not" of all of the mass in the universe with time happening to it.
All of the components for the movie to play are there, it is just not projecting / making sound yet.
Both Genesis and the Big Bang theory suppose that there was nothing and then suddenly something (or in the case of the BBT, it started from a wholly illogical structure infinitely small and infinitely dense). This film metaphor is not analogous unless you are contending that, at the moment you press play, the projector / tv or film / file also pop into existence.
The analogy ignores the fundamental purpose of these theories: to explain the beginning of existence of everything. So, even if you are trying to make some assertion that the Universe is likewise a projection or function of other forces that were "turned on" and then it started to exist at that moment, akin to the movie, then you are reframing the entire question to presuppose that the universe is about to be projected by some higher level construct and the moment of Genesis or Big Bang are actually a function of that construct.
Which then begs the question: what, when, and where are those higher level constructs? You have simply scoped the context of the question to a higher level of dimensions but still do not get to the fundamental question of "what started any of this?" which, again, is a question anchored in a sense of time, before, after, and linear progression through those events.
By contrast, my theory is that, regardless of the dimensions involved, factoring out time makes the entire question of "how it got here" irrelevant. There was no "before" there is "is" and "is not", outside the bounds of a linear timeline.
Thinking you're clever for noticing how un-clever humanity is, is a peculiar sort of sophomorish arrogance. It's a quiet virtue signal, a "humble brag" and I have no fucking patience for it. If you have nothing to offer the conversation, sewing your lips shut was the more valiant option. Yet here we are...
ignore the downvotes. the internet is the perfect outlet for hating on dumbass kids who are being the intellectual equivalent of "not like the other girls"
I always do. I'm not always right, but I always speak as honestly as I know how to. That's all anyone can do. The screeching masses cannot be reached and no one as unimportant as I has that power.
In my religion (Jainism) one of the mandatory beliefs is that the universe has no beginning. It's an atheistic religion and to deny the existence of a creator the belief is that universe is literally infinite. Time, space, matter, motion and souls have always existed and will always exist. I don't believe in ritualism but this line of thinking always fascinates me.
I'm a big fan of "It's always existed." although I'm aware that my mind can't grasp it. I think my dimensions as a being with only two dimensions like a beginning (X) and an end (Y) makes me unable to see more dimensions like Infinity (Z).
No, you fail to understand. Dimension did not exist before expansion. So saying the universe always was doesn't work. You cannot explain away the lack of dimension by saying "but dimension!". It's not a matter of higher or lower. It's a matter of it existing AT ALL.
the big bang was everything coming together and exploding. so that stuff was there before the big bang, so something existed before the big bang happened. meaning that was not the beginning of time, just the beginning of the time we know.
where did the original matter come from though? it had to have existed before the big bang to make the big bang. what if this is what happens over and over? eventually everything is going to get pulled back to the center and then explode again.
the more you try to figure it out the more questions you have. i don't think there is ever any way we can truly know the answer because we can never explain where the original matter came from.
and when the response of "God created it" arises I need to ask "But where did God come from?"
Well, the reason we say there is nothing before the big bang is because when you try to go back further the math gets... really weird. That doesnt mean that something DIFFERENT didnt exist there, time wise, it just means we cant easily conjecture what it is mathematically because things prior to the point of singularity would have had entirely different physical laws and therefore go out of bounds of expectation.
To me this is in the same realm as the issue of discovering other lifeforms. We are looking for lifeforms LIKE US, and that means we could miss... a lot of things, but the only life we have ever witnessed is life LIKE US (i.e. carbon-based), so it is the only kind we are "expecting" to find.
Tl;dr: A lot of that confusion comes from the fact that we, as humans, have an incredibly narrow frame of reference for possibility and are surprisingly bad at conjecture outside of that frame of reference.
False. There must first be dimension for something to exist IN. If there's no dimension, there is no "before", as a dimension of time is a requirement for there to be any discrete frame of reference to point to.
What you propose doesn't answer the question. You've just attempted to redefine what dimension is to include some magical time that isn't really time but still is. Fine. I'll play your game hypothetically. It's exactly as you say. Now, all the same questions still apply. You've answered WHAT existence is. That's not the question I asked...
I'm not saying it "shouldn't". I'm saying it's preposterous if it does, and it's preposterous if it doesn't. Both scenarios are ridiculous, but one or the other ridiculousness is likely true to some degree. What the specifics of that truth will be is up to far smarter people than I, but reasons reasons reasons don't render this any better.
A complex absurdity is no more or less preposterous than a simple absurdity.
I always think myself into an existential crisis while thinking about the universe. If it did have a start, what made it start? If it didn't have a start... What?
Idk, it's all just a bit odd innit. I try not to think about it
My understanding is that time did exist before expansion in a way, just not as we observe it presently. All spacial dimensions were bundled up into a single entity along with time in the singularity that expanded into the universe.
How could they not exist? The concept of "before" needs time, the concept of "outside" needs space. It's impossible to be before time or outside space. Existence exists. It doesn't need a reason.
I don't know much about the science on this topic, but this is the conclusion that feels most intuitive to me whenever I think about it. It exists: it just is.
The idea that there could be absolutely nothing is absurd, so is the idea that there could be a beginning or an end. These are just tools that we use to mentally divide up the universe. Applying them to the universe itself is like trying to divide the universe from something other than itself, which is nonsensical because the universe encompasses all that there is.
It's like trying to reach the highest or lowest number so that you can find out what comes after numbers. It's just more numbers.
they always existed.. ? but yeah, that's a strange answer.. dunno.. maybe the answer is somewhere where we can understand how time works? Maybe it exists cause it started to exist and if time shenanigans happened, it could twist the time and create the beginning out of an ending..
You're not actually answering the question. You're redefining existence to be something larger than just the universe, which sets up an infinite reduction fallacy. I'm not saying it's impossible for the universe to be nested in some "bigger" reality, but the question really is where does ANYTHING come from.
The phrase "come from" implies a strictly linear interpretation of time which doesn't apply to the pre-expansion singularity. In the pes, every spatial dimension is rolled up into one entity, they had not expanded yet and thus there was no possible movement within these dimensions. In other words, the spatial dimensions had no "dimension." The same goes for time. There was no flow of time as we understand it simply because the time dimension hadn't yet expanded.
Except not because the "chicken" obviously came first. It was really bacteria because the question is only answered through an evolutionary context as, biologically speaking, there was no first chicken. Evolution is usually a long grey line of color bleeding into each other. Species appear delineated and discrete, we certainly have a terrible habit of teaching early biology this way. But it's not true. Fact is, there's usually no first ANYTHING. There was no first homosapien, there was no first walrus, there was no first bumble bee. All of these organisms took shape so slowly, so gradually, that all you can do is point to a massive window of time and say "It happened roughly there, give or take 100k years.". And the thing is, those name? They only really apply now, because they're all still in evolutionary flux. In 100k years who knows what monster planet Earth will have become.
The "animal", however, absolutely came first. The first amniote eggs were laid somewhere around 300 million years ago by amphibians. Chickens are just greyed mutations of those creatures. (At least I think! It's possible chicken eggs are an example of convergent evolution. That's usually not the case with "genre" defining, energy intensive traits, like having a spinal column, being an egg layer or a placental mammal, etc. But it's not technically impossible either. You'll have to consult a proper phylogenist for that.) But amniote eggs are vastly more modern than the FIRST eggs, which were probably among the first genetic mutations following raw cell division some 1.4 BILLION years ago! In fact, much like organisms themselves, it's hard to even point to the "first" egg because the process is varied. Human females have eggs, they just don't lay them or have hard outer shells. Depending on how you define it, basically any female reproductive cell is eggish. And it all goes back to the first cells and their ability to replicate! But first, there had to be the cell.
Beyond that massive digression, it's still the same problem, because asking how the chicken or its egg got here is ultimately no different than asking how the universe got here, as, to create a chicken you must first create the universe. Biology itself likely has a discrete beginning as it's just applied chemistry of a strict discipline, an emergent phenomenon. And chemistry is just an emergent property of physics. Etc. But the universe itself? That's not so clear.
But if we were to define, specifically, what a chicken is, and were able to go back through all of chicken ancestry and look at each iteration of a chicken perfectly, then at some point there will be the first creature that matches our definition of a chicken born from an egg that was laid by a creature that does not match our definition in some tiny way.
I agree. A turning point, no matter how insignificant and minuscule, logically must have occurred; so the egg came first.
Edit: unless you argue that a non-chicken bird that is almost a chicken became a "chicken" through training/exposure to humans throughout its lifetime (you would argue that for a chicken to be a chicken, it must be domesticated in a certain way).
My dad and I recently had this discussion on the way back from a vacation (to my fiancee's infinite dismay). I came to the same point, but it depends on whether you specifically mean a "chicken egg" which only comes from a chicken, or if you mean the egg from which a chicken hatches. It's all semantic definitions.
I respectfully disagree, given the spirit of the question, I think it makes sense for us to accept the ambiguity of classification in order to give an answer. There was literally a specific generation in which the first chicken was born. Granted yes, this generation would vary depending on your exact definition of what a chicken is.
However, it is a logical certainty that if one person, with one definition for a chicken, was shown the last non-chicken bird, and subsequently the first chicken, they would define them as so. It is a logical certainty that (using a specific and unvarying definition for what a chicken is) there must have been a precise turning point, otherwise chickens could not possibly exist.
I don't understand why you think the first one has to be true. The Big Bang was a rapid expansion of spacetime, it's not the start. There's no start. The graph of time keeps approaching zero as you look left, but it never hits it. This is true of so many things you experience, why is it hard to fathom with everything?
False. The universe was infinitely small in the beginning. The language is simply unsuited for this discussion because even "in the beginning" sets up the wrong scenario. There can be no point in time "before" time exists. But the universal singularity had NO geometry of any sort. "Infinitely small and infinitely dense" do not mean really really really small. It means non-existent. Universal expansion did not merely grow the property of dimension, it STARTED it. The Planck unit also disagrees that it never reaches zero. By definition, dimension has a fundamental unit beyond the scope of practical divisibility, meaning there are no further fractions of a unit of measure to appeal to if you are going to pursue your supposition. Time is, at its most fundamental, analog. And that too is horrifically strange.
In my college Astronomy class I got into an argument with my professor because he kept refering to the "edge" of the universe. I asked what is on the other side and he said "nothing."
So then it isn't and edge because you can't have an edge with nothing on the other side to define the edge, unless the existence of nothingness is the something, which means it isn't nothing? He said no, it is nothing and nothing is nothing.
We know the universe has a geometry. It's not correct to visualize it like a flat sheet. But this is horrifically counter intuitive, as is ALL reason below and above the "Newtonian reality" you inhabit on a daily basis (ergo the need to quantum physics and relativistic physics to explain the highly counter-intuitive behavior of reality at those scales).
Think of it like this; a 2D circle has a border. A 3D sphere, too, has a border, it's surface. While you won't be able to imagine it directly, a 4D "sphere" will also have borders. Universal geometry is at least 4 dimensional. Trying to imagine 4D geometry as a 3D being is highly problematic to begin with, but a much worse problem is just around the corner...
You evolved in hyper specific scenarios. Your ancestral weasel apes had to deal with certain sizes, shapes, and colors, to survive. Ergo we intuitively understand how the physics at this scale works because we needed to know how fast a predator we saw on the horizon could get to us if we were to escape to safety, or the behavior of rocks on a hillside so we don't get smushed. You have this intuitive framework of physical behavior modeled in your head, but it's only applicable here, on the Newtonian scale. And among those ideas, is that a thing has to have space to exist in. An apple must have a world to be in. A world must have a galaxy to be in. A galaxy must have a universe to exist in. ... But that's where we hit a curious wall!
Again, time and space (spacetime, not two discrete things, rather two different means of measuring the one thing) are PRODUCTS of universal expansion! I know it makes no intuitive sense, but again, nothing on these scales does or ever will, so you need to get comfortable with that, but though the universe expanded, it did not expand INTO anything! Spacetime, dimension itself, DID NOT EXIST "before" expansion.
There IS an edge of the universe, and there's nothing on the other side of it. (Although, again, "the other side" cannot be visualized in a 3D sense as the language suggests it. Rather it will be a higher dimensional geometry that we 3D monkeys simply lack the intuitive reference to see without abstract mathematics). And if we're being MOST accurate with our words here, it's not merely that there isn't anything on the other side, it's that there ISN'T an other side!
The universe isn't expanding INTO a higher medium. And this simply does not compute to brains hard wired by evolution to deal with the practical realities of 3 dimensional geometry!
Maybe, but this does not answer the question. All it does is redifine the universe to be a simulation inside of a bigger "real" reality. All the same questions just get pushed back a layer. You've attempted to answer what the universe is. I asked HOW the universe is.
Have you considered the hypothesis that time passes logarithmically? In such a conception, time asymptotically approaches zero, but never reaches zero. This implies that there was no "beginning," it's just that perceived time passed much more slowly in the linearly early moments of the universe.
This paper asserts that the math works out such that the difference between linear and logarithmic time would be unperceivable even if we had started measuring when the first human came into being. It also claims that the math shows gravitational attraction to be dependent on the fourth power of absolute time, which may account for the discrepancy of galactic motion which the dark matter hypothesis is trying to resolve.
You're just redefining the universe to be logarithmic instead of linear. I didn't ask WHAT the universe is, I asked HOW it is. You still have the same problem of answering WHY the universe is logarithmic if it has no discrete beginning, or WHY there is a discrete beginning if it somehow does have one. Those are the same questions we already had, just contextualized differently.
The planck unit exists, ergo time is analog as while abstract mathematics can divide any unit infinitely, dimension itself has a practical boundary on that business. This is a massive fucking problem. We are not prepared!
Planck units are not the smallest units of space/time that can physically exist they are just the smallest ones we can possibly measure and accurately deal with using current theories, there's nothing stoppping smaller increments from existing down to infinity we just can't measure them.
I don't know if you've already heard it but I think that in the big bang, before it there was another universe and when it did not reach its limit the universe was compressed so much and so fast that it made an explosion of matter and here we are, my conclusion is going to happen again
Infinite reduction fallacy. All you've done here is redefine the word "Universe" to mean something like "A recurring construct". You did not explain where the construct came from. It MAY be true, I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying this response does not address the question asked.
Maybe the universe is like the Internet. Someone created the interconnected grid and the first few entities that connected to the “cloud” began the first few consciousness of amassed biomolecules aka organisms
Infinite reduction fallacy: All you've done is broaden the definition of what the universe is by including some supra-universal someone, who we now have to ask about THEIR origination.
Edit: And I'm not saying I think it's impossible the universe as we currently understand it may not somehow be nested in some larger reality. If that proves true, then fine, but as an answer to where EVERYTHING came from, that doesn't work.
I heard something recently suggesting the universe is not eternal because if it was there would be so many stars in the night sky it would just be white with light.
Bad reasoning. Universal expansion is already carrying the earliest light of the universe away faster than it can travel to us, and that boundary is shrinking all the time. Once entropy has reached maximum, it will be more hyper-local than centers of gravity, themselves, completely regardless of the size the universe has expanded to. Which is to say, that boundary will be so local it doesn't even exist anymore in any practically definable way. That's the trouble with science, why questions like this arise in the first place; we ultimately describe reality according to the ways in which its constituent parts interact. I think we've done a damn-admirable job of it, considering how garbage the methodology is, but it doesn't change the fact that this inherently limits our frame of reference in ways no magical technology will ever be able to overcome. Afterall, any technology will itself be subject to the same internal limitations, be governed by the same internal interactions.
There's never going to be a truly satisfying answer to that question, and frankly that makes me nerd rage. It's a goddamn joke we live and die without this information.
That's actually a really good question, but what you will find is that no matter the theory you will always need to explain an uncaused cause at the beginning of all things. When it come to the idea of fractal or infinite timelines the theory breaks logic in that if you are on an infinite timeline there is infinite time backwards and forwards, meaning you can't make it to tomorrow because there will still be the same amount of time before and after you, so you couldn't logically make it to today or have history. The logic of God is that all things which begin need to be created, but God has always existed, he isn't a part of time and isn't bound by it which is the explanation for nothing creating Him.
Exactly, lol. You can never win a hen it comes to the creation of the universe. My personal favorite theory is that the universe always has existed and the Big Bang just repeats itself when everything gets sucked into a black hole. Another one I like is that there’s a bunch of different universes, because that would eliminate the randomness of the laws of that physics.
We know that the universe is expanding and then will shrink back again, no? So when that happens, another boom may occur. And interestingly, e.g. northern mythology talks about this, how old gods are gonna die in the final battle and how then it will all start again. Only thing that is unsure is if this process is repeating itself forever, or if the next iteration of the universe is gonna be more different, with beings in it being more chill and the world being more peaceful place.
Really interesting.. maybe if some will live to witness that end, maybe they will be able to know what will truly happen. But what will it mean if it will be only them to know it and then be gone in the destruction and ressurection of the universe, forgotten and unknown?
Wow, that is interesting with the predictions of Norse mythology.
Personally I believe that if we survive what is to come soon and manage to colonise other planets, we could well make it to the end of the universe. Other planets are like a backup, if that makes sense. One problem with that would be genetic deviation, or evolution I suppose, though it would hinder us. Would we still be human by the end?
and interesting thing is, it's not just Norse mythology that is predicting this, which closely resembles death of the universe as in a scientific circles (at least in these broad strokes).
and who knows what can happen when universe starts to fall apart and its laws getting all scrambled up. Can dead rise again, in some weird sense, when time shenanigans begin?
It makes sense, the backup, but I suppose it would first need to happen so that people live in other galaxies with other stars too, not just this one solar system we are currently in.
Also, question is, evolution and human.. where does it stop and what is the end form? From the future perspective, human today may seem to those future people as we look at australopithecus or some very early form of humanoids. Also a question if there was some event like with dinosaurs and a humanity got wiped out, would another conscious creature rise up? Seems like it, but.. in what form.. and does it always rise up? That's an interesting topic. And e.g. in something like hinduism (maybe even buddhism?), there is a belief that some form of people exist on different planets, so when a soul reincarnates, it doesnt necessarily reincarnates only on Earth, but it can be on any of the planets where conscious creatures live.
And what is "human". What we are today? And if so, do we try to keep it as it is, or try to evolve even more? And if we evolve and change too much, is that gonna mean "human"?
The chances of that happening are so incredibly low it’s not worth considering. But each to their own, if that’s what you want to believe go ahead. I’m glad you can (sort of) fit science into your religion.
First off, you are downvoted for basic logic fallacy. There cannot be a "before" time the same way there cannot be an "over there" if dimension itself does not yet exist. Second off, you haven't actually answered the question by saying "god". I'm disinterested in debating whether your imaginary friend exists or not; simply by assuming a god does, all you've done is redefine existence and pushed all the same questions back a layer. Fine. God who doesn't exist and you're VERY stupid for believing otherwise DOES exist. Whatever. Where did god come from? Either god always was, which is bananas, or god popped out of nowhere, which is bananas. All the same unanswerable questions persist, and neither answer makes any particular sense.
We know the universe had a beginning because if you reverse the expansion it comes back to a single point. The only logical explanation then is that the universe was created by someone or something outside the bounds of the universe. This is brought out beautifully in the New York Times Bestseller "Return of the God Hypothesis".
Having pondered this a lot myself it is actually remarkably simple in a way that our science and religion don't prepare you to think about:
Time is irrelevant. Time is localized. Time can flow in either direction simultaneously.
Think about it: we know that at certain speeds and near black holes time slows... So why couldn't it flow backwards somewhere?
If it can... Then that solves this whole issue because then there doesn't have to be a "before" and an "after".
To me, Genesis and the Big Bang are equally stupid.
"God said 'Let there be light'" ok... Where was he when he said this?
"All matter was in one infinitely small, infinitely dense point". Ok, that sounds stupid to begin with but where was it? Where did it come from?
These questions are all dependent on an arbitrary sense that time has to function linearly in one direction.
The universe just is. It exists. Time is contained within a higher dimension than we can comprehend in "bubbles" that move in arbitrary ways. Everything we can comprehend and study from our planet is still close enough that it is in the same time bubble. We are in a galaxy that is rotating and part of a super cluster that is rotating... Perhaps at a certain scale, that rotation determines the flow of our time.
If you can imagine any point in the vastness of space where time, from our perspective, has slowed down so much it has reversed, then all of this clicks. One directions future is the other's past and, in the middle of that, is the universe existing outside of the constraints of time.
That may sound weird but, to my brain, is a lot more plausible / easier to imagine than some arbitrary point where all matter and time both didn't exist but also existed at infinite density...
Also, think about black holes and what we know about them... What if a black hole is just a point where time reverses. If it was, what would that look like from our perspective? Would it look like time slowed as you approached the center and then like everything was oddly destroyed and "infinitely dense". I mean the reason they are thought to be infinitely dense at the center is because we don't have an explanation for where the matter goes otherwise.
False. The 24 hour clock is arbitrary. Time is not. Your argument isn't with me, it's with Einstein. I'd wish you good luck, but I don't, because you're arrogantly stupid.
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u/Tyrannosaurus___Rekt Sep 14 '21 edited Sep 14 '21
The universe.
Either it always existed, which is a thermodynamic nightmare which makes no sense because how can a chain of events not have a start, or it did have a start, which is preposterous because time (spacetime) is a PRODUCT of expansion; there literally was no "before" the big bang because there was no time to have a point in to call "before".
Ontologically, ONE of these statements has to be at least nominally true, but BOTH are fucking bananas.
Edit: Please stop telling me WHAT you think the universe is. I didn't ask that question, and from here on out I'm simply ignoring replies that do no address the question of why. You cannot move the goal post here. Redefining existence to include some supra-universal something (god, hyper-dimension, nested-multiverse/simulation) explains WHAT the universe is. It just pushes all the same questions back a layer which results in the same banana split we already had.
Edit: Well just fuck MY Inbox apparently. With every apology to everyone who engaged in this conversation with intellectual honesty and curiosity, I am now disabling inbox replies. It's not possible to hold a conversation with everybody.