Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Susan Stanko on November 2, 2010 at 2:32pm

Those things happened AFTER the big Bang.

Permalink Reply by George on November 28, 2010 at 2:48pm

BBC - Cosmos may show echoes of events before Big Bang

Evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang can be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe, scientists have asserted.

Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that analysis of this cosmic microwave background showed echoes of previous Big Bang-like events.

The events appear as "rings" around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.

The unpublished research has been posted on the Arxiv website.

Permalink Reply by godfree inseaofred on December 1, 2010 at 5:18am

I love this discussion! Let me share one of my favorite mind-bending thought experiments.

When travelling at the speed of light, a photon from when light first existed in the universe would have not "experienced " any passage of time at all (assuming that it has traveled in a vacuum), so how old it is depends on whether it is being timed by someone like us or by the photon itself. Further, other photons created at the exact same moment but travelling through different gradients of gravity (slowing some down more than others) would mean that each would "experience" a different amount of time passing to us, and of each of them in relation to the others.

I am not an expert in the area, and I am sure I have not covered all of the exigencies. For me it is still a fun exercise to take the view of one photon or another to try to think about what time is. I will admit that I usually just end up with a definition that is too plastic to have any real meaning.

Best response? Time is relative.

Permalink Reply by Apeman Jim on December 10, 2010 at 12:09pm

I would classify this question in a cousin catagory to whether god exists or not.  The reason I say that is all intelligence (information) would by neccessity be void at the originating singularity our universe may have 'burst' from.  since we would have no means of measuring or proving the existence of said information, it would be almost as implausible as trying to measure a 'supernatural being' such as a god.

We may be one of many universes, our universe may 'recycle itself', or any miriad of possibilities which we have never considered. 

all we can do is speculate... and eat cookies

Permalink Reply by Bryon on December 10, 2010 at 2:40pm

Okay. Follow me on this. If time can be measured by means of a clock this would indicate it's existence, right? Measuring a thing causes the thing to be effected and one cannot effect a thing that does not exist. If it has existence then it has to have an entropy of at least S=1 since that is the minimum for existence. If the BB had an entropy of S=1/0 which is the most it could have since it was before the  existence of the universe and had to have an entropy greater then S=0 which is non-existence, then time could not have existed before the BB. If time has an entropy greater then S=1/0 then it could not exist in a state of higher order then it's self. Does this make sense?

Permalink Reply by Terry S. on December 22, 2010 at 8:38pm

I'm not sure on this one, but I saw an episode of "Through the Wormhole"--it was a miniseries about modern physics with Morgan Freeman as the host--that proposed something interesting: that time doesn't really exist at all, only in the mind of the observer.  It basically was saying that the whole of reality, past, present, future, exists now how it always has and always will, and it is fixed, but as sentient beings (and this part is mostly me, interpreting...) our brains cannot understand the universe in this whole way.  Rather, we have to relate things in a relative manner, from one moment to the next.  The TV show used the analogy that time is really like a temporal currency, like a heart beat or any other measure you could come up with.  The concept of time was invented by humans because of the way we experience reality, but since we already know our own perceptions and senses can't be truly trusted in the strictest, most scientific way, it is possible that time does not exist at all.

 

Most interestingly, they also talked about the history of the physics equations involved in this idea, and how one scientist (sorry I forgot the name right now) fixed the problems in one fundamental equation by removing the factor of time.  Food for thought.  

 

TS

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