Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 08, 2014, 20:00 (3723 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: All I am doing is looking at the evidence we see within the universe and tracing it back in time. Time is a variable we measure between events, and space is a variable we measure between objects like atoms. If we trace the universe back then we get to a primordial state where neither time nor distance can be measured and therefore space-time no longer exists.
Trying to discuss this primordial state as if it existed within some extended Newtonian universe where time and space still exist seems to be where you are both going wrong. There is no "before" or "outside" to the primordial state.-It seems to me that this is a language problem. "Primordial" means earliest, original, what existed at the beginning. And so of course you can argue that there can be nothing "before" or "outside" the beginning ... but what beginning? Each human birth is a beginning, but nobody would dream of saying nothing preceded it. The origin of life is a beginning, and we're still searching for what led to it. Why, then, should anyone assume that nothing preceded the birth of our universe? As I see it, there is simply no escaping the chain of cause and effect. You seem, with some reluctance, to have agreed that energy is indeed what came before, and so although you like to regard the universe as everything there is, the beginning of the universe was NOT the beginning of everything. It was preceded by energy:-GEORGE: Furthermore the primordial state has no mass or energy, or more precisely it has zero energy. However energy can exist in both positive and negative forms. So zero energy can be a balance of positive and negative energies. The hypothesis therefore is that some positive and negative energies by chance separated out, thus creating time and space and setting off the expansion of the primordial state to become the universe we see.-Tony and David have both answered this to the effect that in that case there has never been "nothing", but must always have been energy. Firstly, what that energy got up to during "always" nobody knows, but I see no reason why anyone should assume that throughout eternity until 14 billion years ago, energy stayed at zero. Hence the argument that ours might be only one of an endless series of universes. Secondly, I do not see how one can speak of "always" or "eternal energy" without linking it to time. "Always" entails reaching back into an endless past. That doesn't mean it has to be measurable in our human terms. May I suggest that it fits in very neatly with Newton's concept of time (irrespective of measurable events) as a constant flow from past to present to future?