383
Evidence (mander.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
90 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] frezik@midwest.social 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's only something we can speculate about. It represents a limit to our ability to gather any evidence that might validate those speculations. We can't say what happened before it, because time itself was one of the things that popped out of the big bang. What would "before" even mean if time didn't exist?

Even if time and matter did exist in some sense, we can't get any evidence for it. We can't make any kind of useful theory about it. At best, we can make wild guesses.

We could also just say "we don't know what it was like". Russell's Teapot suggests we should instead say there was nothing, because we can't prove there was anything.

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 months ago

There's no evidence to point to the big bang as being the very beginning, though. There may well have been a billion big bangs before this one. Each one taking so long to reset and start anew that to us, it might as well be seen as about infinity. Humanity outright doesn't have the knowledge of what happens on extremely large or extremely small scales. We don't really have a clue for what actually made space start to expand in the first place, so we don't know if it's ever happened before, or even if it happened anywhere else at any other time but outside of our observable universe.

[-] ameancow@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it's conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating "cold" end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it's identical to the beginning states.

I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 5 months ago

Maybe there were other big bangs, but we need evidence of that, and that evidence doesn't exist.

Jyst saying "but we don't know" isn't a replacement for evidence.

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 5 months ago

There's no evidence that time started at the big bang, either. So it's silly to say.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 5 points 5 months ago

Not how it works.

"Time exists" is a positive statement. We need evidence for positive statements. There is no evidence of time until the big bang.

this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
383 points (94.0% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
3104 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sal@mander.xyz
fossilesque@mander.xyz
SciBot@mander.xyz