Before the Big Bang? a new view (Origins)

by dhw, Saturday, December 12, 2020, 08:37 (1229 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I see outside our universe total void, a complete nothing. Why we are here is up to your reasoning. What is your first cause? That has to exist. We had a demonstrated beginning in time as the CMB demonstrates.

dhw: “Nothing will come of nothing.” (King Lear). How about an eternal and infinite universe of matter and energy, endlessly in flux? If the big bang happened, it was just one incident among many.

DAVID: The problem with that answer is it requires a universe with spacetime that is not flat, and all the evidence we currently have says it is flat.

dhw: I’m sorry, but I have no idea what this means. Perhaps you could explain. Nor do I have any idea how anyone can possibly know what an infinite universe looks like, since the vastness that we can observe would be infinitesimal in infinity. Nor do I know how anyone can possibly know what the universe was like before the big bang (if it happened).

DAVID: Explained in my book, Spacetime is flat, convex or concurved. Current evidence flat and will expand into heat death 100 billion years in the future.

If the universe is eternal, how does anyone know what happened BEFORE the big bang; if it’s infinite, how does anyone know its shape; and how does anyone know what will happen 100 thousand million years from now to all the parts of the universe that we currently know nothing about? And finally, I really don’t know how anyone can believe in a single eternal “first cause” conscious mind and yet regard an eternal "first cause" universe of non-conscious matter and energy as impossible.