Before the Big Bang? (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, July 28, 2014, 10:16 (3769 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: From what I read, most everybody thinks 'our' spacetime started with the bb. The big debate is what existed prior to the bb.-Yes, that is what you and I are discussing too, and previously you have argued that although there was a “before”, it was “timeless” because a true stasis is timeless. I have queried the assumption that “before” was a stasis, and hence that ‘our' space and time were the beginning of space and time.-DAVID: 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.-This is confusing. You have told me that a virtual vacuum is not nothing, but contains particles that “pop” in and out of existence. Do Stenger and Krauss have a different definition?-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.
DAVID: 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.-The Strassler article (which you have referred to before) may make riveting reading for would-be quantum theorists, but I'm afraid it doesn't help me very much. You comment as follows on quantum fluctuations: “Not 'nothing' but a strange something.” I am on your side in my opposition to the nothing theory! Whether the “something” that preceded the BB was pure energy, virtual pure energy, with matter particles, field particles, potential particles, virtual particles, fermions, bosons etc. or none of these makes no difference to the fact that for you and me, who believe in cause and effect, some form of energy must have transmuted itself into the matter that led to the existence of us both. Unless you believe that field particles provide evidence that your first-cause “pure energy” has always been conscious of itself, I don't understand why you need to bring these highly specialised categories into the discussion.