Big Bang: beginning a universe (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 00:26 (3995 days ago) @ David Turell

A rather long summary article on the beginning:-"Any hope of us observing the ultimate origin is fading, however. Soon after Vilenkin and Mithani published their argument, physicist Leonard Susskind of Stanford University in California responded with two papers. In them, he says that a beginning, if it did indeed occur, is likely to have been so far in the past that for all practical purposes the universe has been around forever.-He argues that because space inflates exponentially, the volume of the vacuum at later times is overwhelmingly greater than at earlier times. With many more bubble universes in existence, chances are that the patch of vacuum we call home formed later on too. The true beginning is likely to have been an awfully long time ago - so far away, that no imprint on the universe has survived. "I find it a paradoxical situation to say that there must have been a beginning, but it is with certainty before any nameable time," says Susskind.-Vilenkin acknowledges this. "It's ironic," he says. "The universe may have a beginning but we may never be able to know exactly what the beginning was like."-Still, cosmologists have plenty of other big questions to keep them busy. If the universe owes its origins to quantum theory, then quantum theory must have existed before the universe. So the next question is surely: where did the laws of quantum theory come from? "We do not know," admits Vilenkin. "I consider that an entirely different question." When it comes to the beginning of the universe, in many ways we're still at the beginning."--http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628932.000-before-the-big-bang-something-or-nothing.html?full=true#.Uq-MevTewil-Yes, where did those pesky laws come from?