Time Before Time [speculative cosmology]

Seed Magazine ^ | August 28, 2006 | Sean Carroll

[Elsie]

Somebody will win.

That 'somebody' is ALWAYS the originator of the 'lottery'.

It is NEVER a given that someone will choose a 'winning arrangement of random numbers'.

[Elsie]

Essentially all of the mass and energy came from nothing...

"Let there be LIGHT!"

[Oberon]

My point is that it's fallacious to evaluate probability retroactively.

You might think that the odds of this universe coming into existence are a googol-to-one, against. However, the odds of this universe coming into existence are actually one-to-one, a sure thing. We all know this because we're here.

[betty boop]

The trick here is that there wasn't much to the universe, neither mass nor size at the start of the BB. Essentially all of the mass and energy came from nothing, no entropy unless there is something, until the inflation phase.

Hi Right Whale! The problem is there isn't much we can definitively say about the singularity prior to the BB. We cannot even say that the physical laws apply to it in any way, for applied retroactively (which reversible time allows), they are all thought to "break down" at that first increment of Planck time. Nor do we know precisely when the inflation began. There are uncertainties or indeterminacies here that may not be soluable.

Guth's remark is very clever. I gather what he's pointing to is the idea that nothing can come from nothing. So there must have been a "something," a first cause, to get the ball rolling (to to speak), but that such a cause may be completely beyond the reach of science.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Time Is
Time Was
Time Is Past

[RightWhale]

The BB did not start with nothing. The object was very small, smaller than an atom, and not heavy, 10 kilograms. Nobody is pretending that there actually was such a thing even though the mathematical model with all its attachments reduces to that when it is run back to Start. As you might guess, I believe the BB is an illusion.

[Doctor Stochastic]

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[betty boop]

As you might guess, I believe the BB is an illusion.

Why would there be an "illusion" before there was any mind to conceive it? I'm sure I'm not following you, Right Whale. Must be my fault.

Do you mean to say the BB is an illusion because the universe is "eternal," i.e., had no beginning?

[RightWhale]

We can hardly say that the universe is certainly as it appears. If we assume that the red shift is due to speed of expansion of the universe, which is a very recent idea on the cosmological time scale, not even a century old, then we see this. Not much over a century ago meteorites did not come from outer space. Less than a century ago there were no galaxies. Everything was inside the Milky Way. Sometime between 1922 and 1960 the universe acquired galaxies and grew to a billion light years radius with the earth and sun four billion years old, presenting a problem that Einstein indicated needed attention evenwhile he promulgated his Relativity as the explanation of the illusions of EM phenomena. Now the universe has grown to 14 billion light years Hubble radius and is 14 billion years old, but that is not the whole story since the volume of the univeerse outside the Hubble radius and permanently unseeable is ten to the thirty times bigger in volume, but earth and sun remain four billion years old.

Since what we see is still changing every day, what we saw before must have been an illusion, so I merely extrapolate that what we see today is still an illusion.

[shibumi]

"Time, unlike space, has an obvious directionality—the view in a mirror makes sense in a way that a movie in reverse never would."

The thing that is obvious is that this poor individual is still abused of the notion that there is such a thing as "directionality" and "location".

I would expand further, but my internal tardis is malfunctioning, and I am therefore unable to bilocate between here and the bathroom at the moment. It's "time" for me to experience all past and future bowel movements in the now. After complete, however, I will return to this thread before it's inception and negate the conversation by correcting the author's misperception, and making thread reversal unnecessary.

[shibumi]

"'Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana' ping"

I like Bananarama.

[Woodman]

I don't really disagree with what you are saying, I just think that measuring time is most likely the answer.

Let's take a unit of measurement like a metre. I seem to remember learning somewhere that there is an official metre stick somewhere in France. I know that the metre is based on some scientific unit based on the wavelength of light(?). If you aligned the metre lengthwise along an axis that was subjected to a great force (say a gravitational well) that literally pulled the atoms in it closer together, it would be shorter, but maybe the wavelength of light aligned in parallel would be as well. Does this make it not a matre anymore?

I don't know the answer, but I feel the same way about time.

[jennyp]

Empty space, in which omnipresent quantum fields are jiggling back and forth, is a natural, high-entropy state for the universe. Eventually (and we're talking about a really, really big eventually) the fluctuations will conspire in just the right way to fill a tiny patch of space with dark energy, setting off the ultra-fast expansion. To any forms of life arising afterward, such as us, the inflation would look like a giant explosion from which the universe originated, and the quiescent background—the other universes—would be completely unobservable. Such an occurrence would look exactly like the Big Bang and the universe we experience.

Something I've always wondered: If a universe spontaneously forms & inflates inside a parent universe, what would happen to anything or anyone who's already inside the parent universe, say within 100 million light years away? Seems to me that would be quite destructive, as in pretty much completely destroying the whole parent universe.

The other scenario, I guess, would be that the new universe could always look like a tiny patch of space inside the parent universe. The baby universe simply gets more & more complex, even as it looks from the inside like it's expanding rapidly in size. This way the new universe wouldn't harm anything in the parent universe - but that strikes me as totally ad-hoc.

[azhenfud]

"Our universe may be the product of yet another universe, about which we know nothing.."

According to Genesis, you may be on to something...

[betty boop]

Since what we see is still changing every day, what we saw before must have been an illusion, so I merely extrapolate that what we see today is still an illusion.

Ergo, it's all an illusion -- the universe and all its contents, within or outside the Hubble radius? (Not that we could have anything at all to say about the latter.)

Are you saying that when a thing changes, whatever its prior form was, it is now an illusion? But things are changing all the time. Does that mean the universe itself is an illusion? And does that mean that you and I are illusions too?

[azhenfud]

Eccl. 3:15

[TXnMA]

You are not separated in Time.

You are separated by angular distance indicative of your positions on the earth's surface relative to the sun. Because the rotation period of the earth is defined as 24 hours, your angular position can be defined as a fraction of that rotation period -- IOW, some fraction of 24 hours.

Nonetheless, you both looked at your watches at the same instant in Time.

[Tiny]

"The low-entropy beginning of our cosmos does appear to be very highly improbable...which is not to say it can't happen."

Entropy and Order appear to be subjective terms used to mean anything the cosmologist needs it to mean to prove their point. The period after the big bang, whether it be pre- or post-inflationary period was chaotic with huge superhot clumpy clouds of gas and plasma that had no order whatsoever. Once the matter coalesced into into galaxies, stars, and planets then order finally began to appear, and entropy was reduced. Increasing entropy may rule the universe today, but I don't think that was always the case.

[RightWhale]

As an Eleatic Thomist I might be inclined to try that solution first unless there is somethng else crying out for preference.

I tend to think, along with Aquinas, that Avicenna was misled when he said that Aristotle said the universe must have existed eternally. The correct eleiatic position, and the correct philosophical position altogether would be that it cannot be proven that the universe either began at some time or that it has eternal existence in that direction even though it may have eternal existence from now on--can't say anything about that, either. As far as the Theologians go, the Text does not support either an eternal universe or a creation from nothing although it can be misread and commonly is in many of the translations we have available.

As to the illusion of the BB: a serious problem exists that Guth solved by his inflation. But, to a layman inflation is no better than simply turning the universe inside out; it is in effect turning the universe inside out. The problem is that the farther we see back in time, if we read the data correctly we are seeing to a time when the universe was smaller than an atom. However, and this is the problem, the farther we see the bigger it gets. These are not two compatible ideas. So this is why inflation was proposed and inflation brings a potload of other strangeness with it. Might as well say the universe inverted or mapped itself to an inverse function. That plays havoc with isotropy, which even Relativity has to assume in order to have a starting point.

[PatrickHenry]

Something I've always wondered: If a universe spontaneously forms & inflates inside a parent universe, what would happen to anything or anyone who's already inside the parent universe, say within 100 million light years away? Seems to me that would be quite destructive, as in pretty much completely destroying the whole parent universe.

It depends on the nature of space, I guess. What happens to the parent universe while there's this enormous spatial expansion going on within it? I can imagine two possibilities:

1. The space of the parent is swept outward, pushed by the inflating space within it. That seems to require some kind of "substance" to space -- at least for this purpose -- which I don't understand, but I guess it's possible. The parent universe would end up surrounding the new universe. The most distant stars (if they existed in the parent) would appear far too old. This hasn't been observed.

2. The inflating space simply "blows by" the existing parent universe and goes on expanding. The result is that the new universe ends up surrounding the parent. The parent region might be observable as a discrete portion of the visible universe, and (if it had stars) it would have older stars than we might otherwise expect -- but only if it were at the horizon of the visible universe, which it probably wouldn't be. If the parent universe were made of dark matter, it wouldn't be observed anyway.