Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 15:31 (3943 days ago) @ George Jelliss

I see David has replied to your post, George, but although we both ask the same fundamental question, I have a slightly different set of replies:-dhw: The issue for me is not time on its own but time linked to cause and effect. If the Big Bang happened, it must have had a cause. You cannot have cause and effect without before and after.
GEORGE: For me this is outdated thinking. Things don't need to have a cause. Things are happening all the time by chance.-Happening by chance precludes a purpose but not a cause! The rock that chanced to fall on my head did so because it was precariously balanced and because the wind blew hard at precisely the moment when I was passing by underneath it. If there chanced to be a Big Bang, what went bang and what made it go bang?
 
dhw: "Past" and "present" are temporal concepts, but that doesn't have to mean time as measured and experienced by us humans in our particular universe.
GEORGE: You appear to be wanting to invent some new fantasy "time" of your own. For me it is just the ticking of a clock.-The clock is a man-made invention geared to our human measurement of time. For me time is the onward movement from cause to effect, from past to present to future (Newtonian), and it is conceivable that in a different universe or even a different part of our own universe there could be different ways of experiencing and measuring it. Even in our own contexts, we have all experienced how in certain situations, time appears to pass more slowly/quickly.
 
GEORGE: I'm not arguing that the universe "came out of" nothingness (although I have considered that in the past) more that "it was" nothingness. I take the "big bang" to be the earliest stage of the universe that we can detect traces of (background radiation and all that). -That is clear. We do not have the means to trace anything that may have happened before the BB.-GEORGE: I suspect there was a certain amount of time and space before that for a short while, but ultimately there was no measurable time or space. I suppose that must be a type of nothingness.-But it tells us nothing about what went bang, where whatever went bang came from, and where whatever that came from, came from. Your argument appears to be that because we cannot trace anything prior to the BB, there was nothing prior to the BB except for a mysterious "short while" which presumably contained an uncaused something that hadn't existed before but went bang.
 
GEORGE: I'm willing to accept that that is where logic leads me...Trying to talk about time before time and space before space is just playing with words.-It's only playing with words because you are not prepared to consider time as a sequence of before and after, and space as something that may have existed before the BB, just as other universes may have existed before ours. I'm suggesting that there may always have been an onward flow from past to present to future (= time), and there may always have been space, and energy within space. But this whole discussion hinges on the question: If the universe "was nothingness" (no time, no space, no energy), what went bang? I'm surprised that logic leads you to say that nothing went bang.