What was there before the Big Bang?

by Brokeback Watchtower 88 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Ruby456

  prologos said

  no such thing as nothing

  agree. But of course this challenges the liberal concept of a world of autonomous individuals. Darwin's interdependence is hard to swallow in a Lockean Newtonian world and meets with huge resistance!!!!

  Mind you I think we do have a certain amount of autonomy to generate change provided we accept that we are part of material networks. If the awareness of this means that we say there is a God and that we have moral responsibilities so be it - so long as we don't say our own morals are immutable and apply to everyone or that everyone oufght to think like us.
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  Freeandclear

  Great discussion, one to which we will most likely never know the answers to.

  My thought. The universe is a small sphere sitting on the desk of a child in his realm of existence. Nothing more than the snow globe sitting on my bookshelf..... Forgotten and rarely looked at.
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  prologos

  FaC: snow globe sitting on my bookshelf. yeah, but a snow globe that is automatically being tilted all the time by one of those devices that animate the other desk mobiles, with a battery that seems to be recharged remotely. because the white stuff keeps flying . Young ones are still born.
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  Ruby456

  Dawkins mentions Smolin's thesis that black holes are perhaps where new universes are born in a kind of cosmological natural selection where hereditary plays a part (The God Delusion p146 & 156). this understanding denies nothingness too.
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  prologos

  Ruby 456: "--this understanding denies nothingness too. " true", absolute nothingness is only a philosophical term. it does not exist in reality, according to all these writers.
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  Ruby456

  proIogos I think it is sad when the baby is thrown out with the bath water. philosophy can be very abstract and bear little resemblance to reality - in reality birth and death are the norm - this tells us something
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  Brokeback Watchtower

  If movement through time started at the big bang, there was no movement prior to it,

  That is a big "if" that we should not neglect because it designates that "no" time before the universe is an assumption or perhaps in the multiverse time runs in every direction could very well be and everything that could ever happen has already happened all at once in the now of no time who's to say really. Just like what came first the chicken or the egg neither if we narrow our concept of what "came first" even means. What if time in our universe runs in the opposite direction that we all mentally perceive it as running what test could we do to find out for sure?

  What about the idea that we have a mirror twin universe where the arrow of time is in reverse of ours? Could be but how do you prove it? At this stage of the inquiry we must proceed on assumptions because of the natural prohibition on exploration outside of our universe.

  
  
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  Fisherman

  What about the idea that we have a mirror twin universe where the arrow of time is in reverse? Could be but how do you prove it?

  Science Fiction... or the idea that the universe is only part of a bigger picture like cell is part of an organism.
  
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  cofty

  All the books I have read about "something out of nothing" Kraus et al, always end up by postulating that there is no such thing as nothing. period.

  Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy. (Indeed, religion and philosophy have added nothing to our understanding of these ideas in millennia.) I spend a great deal of time in the book detailing precisely how physics has changed our notions of “nothing,” for example. The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly. I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.” Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur. - Lawrence Krauss
  
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  Fisherman

  “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur. - Lawrence Krauss

  Depends on what is being referred to as "nothing." Krauss is a science fiction writer. He dreams about what existed before the universe was formed.

  Did energy (matter) exist before the "big bang?"

  Did location or space exist before the big bang?

  Did time exist without space before the big bang?

  What in the world exploded into the big bang?

  Did any laws or information exist before the big bang?
  

  Is there some primordial substance that is the source of of the universe and everything in it?

  no one has scientific evidence that shows.........