Far out cosmology: was there a before (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 26, 2023, 22:14 (606 days ago) @ David Turell

More review:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-did-the-universe-begin?utm_source=acs...

"Our growing knowledge of physical laws has allowed us to rewind the tape on the universe, tracing its evolution back to within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Here, however, when the sum total of matter and energy coalesces in a ball of infinite density and temperature, the equations of general relativity break down.

"As a theory, “the Big Bang leaves out the bang,” physicist Brian Green writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Whatever happened in that instant, let alone before that moment, is anyone’s (well-reasoned) guess — and there is no shortage of guesses of how the universe began.

"First, a caveat: Many experts argue that the word “before” misses the mark. It assumes there was some pre-existing time separate from the universe, when really, time and space may have emerged out of the universe.

"In this view, the question — “what came before the big bang?” — is literally meaningless. Stephen Law, an Oxford philosopher, has suggested in interviews that what we need is not an answer to these kinds of questions, but “a kind of therapy, an explanation that will make us realize why it’s time to stop asking the question.”

"The idea pushes human language and intuition to their breaking point, but we can try to make sense of it with a favorite analogy of the late physicist Stephen Hawking: Wondering what happened before the big bang is like wondering what’s south of the South Pole. It’s not even accurate to say there is nothing farther south; the point is that the question itself is nonsensical. We’re trying to pin down something that simply doesn’t exist.

***

"One prominent advocate of this perspective is Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist at Tufts University. In a 1982 paper, written for an audience of professional physicists, he conceded that “the concept of the universe being created from nothing is a crazy one.”

"Nevertheless, he argued that the laws of physics alone could have given rise to all we see around us.

"As MIT physicist Alan Lightman has described it, “the entire universe could have ‘suddenly’ appeared from wherever things originate in the impossible-to-fathom haze of quantum probabilities.”

"Still, you might suspect that this “nothing,” if it was compatible with the creation of reality as we know it, was “something” after all.

"David Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University, has argued exactly that: “If what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place.”

"When it comes to understanding the concept of a universe from nothing, there’s an important difference between philosophical nothing and physical nothing. Namely, the latter still includes the laws of nature required for cosmic genesis.

"Even granting Albert’s point, though, we’re merely kicking the can down the road. Whatever our universe came from, that too must have come from something else (at least according to the commonsense expectations of feeble human brains)."

Comment: multiverse, cyclic universe and Penrose special cyclic form are mentioned for completeness. Guth et al paper simply said there was no before, before the Big Bang. They simply could not prove one nad neither would anyone else. Brian Green sets up the Big Bang theory backwards. From my viewpoint, if space and time started the beginning it came from nothing. God made it happen.