Before the Big Bang, what was there?
John Beard from Cambridgeshire (age 55+)
What was there before the universe?
Zakaria Rashid from Greater London
Age 5-14
They talk about the big bang, but what was there before the big bang, why was there just an empty darkness, where did it come from and why?
Dez from Derbyshire
Age 35-44
If our universe began with a ‘Big Bang’, where did the components for the big bang come from? How can our existence ever be entirely explained? Where do all the universes end? They cannot end. It makes my head hurt just trying to imagine the enormity of these questions. It’s exciting and terrifying.
Mrs Linda Bryant from West Sussex
Age 55+
Was there anything before the big bang? What is space?
Jonathan Hawkins from Powys (Aged 15-25)
What triggered the big bang? If there was nothing beforehand, and as space is linked with time, that was also the beginning of time, how did it happen that all this matter appeared from nowhere and started expanding?
Ed Rixon from Berkshire (aged 15-25)
What existed before the Big Bang? I.e. what was it that went bang?
Rob Mansfield from Telford and Wrekin (Age: 55+ )
How did the universe begin? What was around BEFORE it began, and what triggered it to begin? Are or were there conscious particles that felt drawn to each other for company? Bringing the earth with them?
Leah J. Warren-Williams from Somerset (age 5-14)
Filed under: Alex Hill's Big Answers, Answered Big Questions, Astronomy Big Questions, Big Bang Big Questions, Cosmology Big Questions, Doug Daniels' Big Answers, Philip Goff's Big Answers, Physics Big Questions, Rockno3's Big Answers, age 55+
It has been suggested by some very clever people that before the big bang there was nothing, except a thing called a singularity in which all the matter was compressed into a tiny space with an enormous density.
Nobody really knows for sure and as yet there is no unified theory that can relate macro events such as the big bang to quantum behaviour. Prof Hawking has not managed it yet and he’s many times cleverer that me!
Were there to have been a singularity then time would have been required to change from a singularity into a big bang. Prof. Hawking has said time came into existance at the big bang. There was no before, so no cause and effect. Logically the universe does not exist, so look for something not based on human logic.
David Whight
The physicist Richard Feynman said that if you think that you understand quantum mechanics then you don’t understand quantum mechanics!!
It just goes to show that scientists need to have imagination just as much as artists – not that I’m suggesting that they are making it up, all the theories have to be backed up by mathematical proofs and experimentation.
This is a philosophical, not a scientific, question.
As the late, great, philosopher, David Hume pointed out a couple of hundred years ago, there is nothing logically contradictory with the notion of there being an uncaused, first moment of time. The first moment of the universe is the first moment of time, from which it follows that there could not be anything before it. End of story.
Of course, it certainly FEELS very strange, and is difficult to swallow, that the universe had no cause (surely SOMETHING must have caused it??!!). Perhaps this is because our whole experience is of a world of things with causes.
But then is it really surprising that the beginning of the universe, the beginning of existence itself, is a little bit different to the kind of things we experience in the world around us?
(I actually believe that the difficulty in believing that the universe did not have a cause is rooted in a commensense, but ultimately incorrect, view of time. But that’s just what I think…)
I know that it must seem like a scientific’cop-out’, but how can we ever know what happened before the Universe came into existance? I don’t know how we can expect to know this as all our understanding (so far) assumes that what happens in the observable Universe is constrained by a certain number of physical laws. It has taken scientists centuries to unravel these laws of physics that attempt to explain how the Universe ’seems’ to work. The operative word here is ’seems’. In order to understand what happens on the large scale, we must also determine what happens on the very small scale. This is because all matter is constructed from atoms. It would be nice if the same basic laws that govern the behaviour of small scale structures like atoms, were the same as the laws that govern the behaviour of large scale structures like galaxies. Unfortunately, try as we might ,at present we cannot absolutely reconcile these two conditions.
Moreover, our understanding depends on the ability to imagine some very abstract concepts, some of which are truly mind boggling and totally at odds with our everyday experience. As human beings, it is very difficult for us to imagine a state of nothingness, for example, or a structure that exists in more than 3 dimensions. It is equally difficult for us to see how if we shoot a photon at a pair of slits, it appears to go through both of them at the same time! It is even more difficult to imagine virtual particles that ’seem’ to suddenly appear out of nowhere!
Our main problem in trying to describe these sort of events, is that they are way outside our normal daily experience and we just don’t have the vocabulary to adequately describe them and only a very few people like Stephen Hawking, have the imagination to visualize them.
If we can’t easily explain what is happening in the Universe as it exists today, how can we even contemplate what happened before it came into existance? For all we know, at such a time, the laws that we have slowly and painfully discovered, may not apply at all; if there was infinite ‘nothingness’ then there was nothing for physical laws to apply to.
I am afraid that we may never know what happened before the Universe, as we know it, came into existence. But I am equally sure that it won’t stop us from thinking about it. This is what makes science so fascinating.
Humans always tend to wonder how time energy and matter first came in to existence at the beginning of the universe from what they assume was a natural state of nothingness. But it could be the other way around. Perhaps it is impossible for nothing to exist and we are in the eternal natural state.
Humans always seem to assume that the start of the universe is virtually inconceivable because it requires the creation of something out of a natural state of nothingness. But it could be the other way around. Perhaps the natural state is for matter or energy to exist and the impossibility is for nothing to exist.
Hj Folks
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Perhaps a clue to the answer lies in the theory that the origins of time coincided with the first change of state, when incredibly big and incredibly dense stars exploded (into supernovae) to produce the stars, planetary systems and chemical compositions which form life as we know it now.
Perhaps a ‘mutually self-repelling’ condition – the opposite of gravity – which may have provided the means for the distribution of all these galaxies did rule before time began.
Perhaps certain parallels can be drawn with the predicted behaviour of energy in and around Black Holes!
It could be that as we learn more about these reversal zones that an answer to the fundemental question becomes more apparent.
This is a perspective which offers an alternative route for speculation, don’t you think?
Good Luck,
Rockno3.
We may be like ants in a bigger system that we cannot comprehend and any attempt to answer the question is pure speculation. Live and be happy!
There had to be something there before it. Even nothing is something, but if there was absolutely nothing, nothing would have caused anything to exist. All humans had a first moment of existance and there were countless moments before it. If there was a tiny ‘ball’ of high density matter, where did that come from? What was around it? If a living thing was in fact there, would it age, or was there actually no time? How would you fit infinate matter into a finate, high density ‘ball’? The term ‘anything is possible’ may or may not relate to this, for is this a question that is impossible to answer?
http://www.physorg.com/news126955971.html
“Before the Big Bang: A Twin Universe?”
“Now, physicists Alejandro Corichi from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Parampreet Singh from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario have developed a simplified LQG [Loop Quantum Gravity] model that gives an intriguing answer: a pre-Big Bang universe might have looked a lot like ours. Their study will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.”
Who knows, but dont tell.
Do we live in the universe or is there a multiverse.
One thing we can say for sure is that there must have been
a reason for our universe to get started.
something about a bubble that surrounded the universe, then the universe was too big for the bubble to contain, then the big bang happened…
i dunno the rest
Doug Daniels, on March 14th, 2008 at 4:12 pm said:
It would be nice if the same basic laws that govern the behaviour of small scale structures like atoms, were the same as the laws that govern the behaviour of large scale structures like galaxies. Unfortunately, try as we might ,at present we cannot absolutely reconcile these two conditions.
Indian cosmology says that before our universe came into existence there was another universe which had passed out of existence – that just like everything we know, if there is a beginning there is an end; when there’s birth there is death – right down to the micro level of the breath going in and out, and thoughts coming and going. So existence is thought of as being simply an eternal rhythm of arising and passing, and that is why it is thought very strange to have the idea that we might only experience one lifetime.
i am convinced that there was something “before” the big bang. I think that a star formed a black hole that then exploded to form the big bang. I think this star is what the relgious people called “god” and that when we die, we too form a black hole, die and then form a new universe in “our” image…and thus it continues ad infintum except with us now taking the part of god able to know everything that is occuring.
It was a freak of mericles that such a thing happened creating reality out of non matter is entirely possible giving the benifit of a slight burst in spontainious imagination HA
All of the above comments look at things from a human standpoint. As always the most elegant explanation of things is usually the simplest. In the beginning, Jehovah created the heavens and the earth. Period. How exactly he did it, we will never know until he reveals it to us
Before the universe, there was nothing, but this nothingness created unbalance which should tell you that it has to find balance, even for nothingness.
Light, heat, mass, and time caused the riff which made the change (AKA.. Big Bang). We are part of that cosmetic balancing act that is taking time to level out.
The universe only wants to balance itself and is doing a fine job at it. It’s just takes many thousands of generations to see results.
“It’s all about Love” and “I’ll be thinking” is what started all of this.
And it took Six Day’s to do all of this in. The answer is right in front of you.