Before the Big Bang? (Origins)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 27, 2014, 16:24 (3555 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: If nobody knows, and if nobody can know, it is clearly pointless to state that space and time did not exist before the BB. At best, it remains a hypothesis with no more likelihood than that of innumerable BBs with space and time.-From what I read, most everybody thinks 'our' spacetime started with the bb. The big debate is what existed prior to the bb. Stenger and Krauss want a virtual vaccumm and a quantum perturbation to start the bb. No one knows why they are so positive in their assumption that we came from nothing.
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> DAVID: The only thing we can observe is a creation through the bb. And pure energy has to be present first, in cause and effect.-> dhw: For those of us who believe in cause and effect, it is quite conceivable, then, that the first cause is energy (“pure” or “virtual pure”) which for ever has been transmuting itself into matter.-I agree, but lets go further. You must undersdtand that not all particles are matter. Fermions are matter particles, bosons are field particles. And I've seen a description of what virtual particles pop in and out of existence (see below). So the first step is to recognize not all quantum particles are matter.-Review Strassler:-http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/-From his blog the vitual vaccuum particles are all field particles, not matter particles:-"Outside of physics, most people think of a vacuum as being the absence of air. For physicists thinking about the laws of nature, “vacuum” means space that has been emptied of everything — at least, emptied of everything that can actually be removed. That certainly means removing all particles from it. But even though vacuum implies emptiness, it turns out that empty space isn't really that empty. There are always fields in that space, fields like the electric and magnetic fields, the electron field, the quark field, the Higgs field. And those fields are always up to something.
 
"First, all of the fields are subject to “quantum fluctuations” — a sort of unstoppable jitter that nothing in our quantum world can avoid. [Sometimes these fluctuations are referred to as ``virtual particles''; but despite the name, those aren't particles. Real particles are well-behaved, long-lived ripples in those fields; fluctuations are much more random.] These fluctuations are always present, in any form of empty space."-Not 'nothing' but a strange something.