To my knowledge, we also have zero evidence that they didn't exist. Nor have we ever observed matter/energy appearing out of ~~thin air~~ vaccuum, so it seems unlikely to me.
And to my knowledge there can't be a before time.
Oh yeah? Then where did they film The Land Before Time? Checkmat
I like how there are at least three things that are immediately recognizable as wrong with this question.
Well, everyone has a skill I guess
Can time really exist if there was no frame of reference to measure it? We can only detect it by motion or entropy. It's the only way of "time". So if there was some point where there was nothing that moved, then time wouldn't exist.
For that matter, there's no way of measuring if time is even consistent. If it were constantly speeding way up, or slowing way down, we'd have no way of knowing.
Time is just a figment of our imagination so we can keep track of movement. Just like magenta isn't a real color.
Well, yes and no. Time is a concept derived from a change in state. There is no “real” time. If the universe before the Big Bang existed in a static state, then the concept of time itself becomes meaningless. So in that case, it would be “before time” in a sense
The state cannot have been absolutely static - if it was, the big bang would not have occurred, and the same stasis would be existing now, unchanged.
Well, we haven't directly observed matter appearing spontaneously in a vacuum, but we have evidence to support it does happen
My layman's understanding is that virtual particles can and do emerge from vacuum, but in ways that usually cancel out before affecting anything. Occasionally it does affect normal stuff - see the Casimir effect acting on surfaces very close together.
I personally suspect this is an explanation for dark matter and a possible origin of the universe.
If there's tiny bits of stuff and anti-stuff blinking in and out of existence, anywhere there's a big fat nothing, both halves should still exhibit gravity before blipping back out. It wouldn't show up as normal matter because it spends most of its time not existing. The vacuum really is empty... on average. It just hums with enough short-lived quantum shenanigans to have nonzero mass.
And if this follows a steep curve for distribution, then it's like blackbody radiation. A hot rock will overwhelmingly emit photon wavelengths near the peak, for any given temperature, but in theory any temperature can emit any wavelength. It just happens with vanishing rarity as you get up into the spicy photons. If vacuum will occasionally fart out a particle and antiparticle, then very occasionally it should fart out two particles and antiparticles, together. And with vanishing rarity it can theoretically fart out an arbitrary quantity of mass, alongside a negation that is presumably equal. But if that's off by a little bit - if it's allowed to be off by a little bit - then an equally arbitrary quantity of mass will remain. Even if the masses have to match exactly, they could recombine in ways that produce angular momentum and never properly rejoin. And if vacuum produces gravity, well, anything that's left will accelerate away in all directions.
On cosmic timescales it's possible that matter just kinda happens. We'd be left with the question of why the fuck that's how anything works, and where all this quantum vacuum bullshit came from. But creationist cranks would have to retreat back to the first sentence. In the beginning, there was nothing. And it was slightly heavy.
Yeah, I suspect that the universe may expand and contract, so likely all the matter in the big bang came from it all being compressed from the previous cycle.
I also think all total matter gets distributed the same way each cycle, so I guess I think all matter that exists now is the same matter that has existed always.
I also think each cycle, everything happens the same way deterministically, even though it would be exciting to see if maybe events happen differently each cycle.
“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”
It's not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can't figure out what was before it.
No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.
But something must have triggered the big bang. The model might not support this, but this only means the model is insufficient to describe what goes beyond our known universe.
But something must have triggered the big bang.
That's a separate claim you'd have to prove. We have no evidence of something triggering it, we don't even know that it would need to be triggered. All of our observations occur inside this universe, therefore we have no idea at all if cause-and-effect even applies to the universe as a whole. The short answer is: we don't know and have no reason to posit the need for something else.
What does it mean for something to be "beyond" everywhere or before time?
I wish we could see beyond our universe, I want to know so much.
That's nonsense. You think some massive amount of matter just materialized from nothing into a singular point? How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?
Not just matter but time as well. That's what they were referring to. There is no "before time".
Regarding your rethorical question: go find an answer and you're sure to win the Nobel Prize.
It wasn't matter that did the banging, it was space-time itself. Have you heard how we know that the universe is expanding? Well we can extrapolate backwards and find the point in time where space-time was just a point: "the big bang". Not only was there no space-time for matter to exist in before the big bang, there was no concept of "before" because that word only makes sense in the context of spacetime. So yeah, the person you're replying to is right, "before the big bang" is a nonsense phrase.
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.
Based on the comment you're replying to, I assume they would say "no, nothing materialized from nothing because there wasn't a 'before' in which nothing could have existed"
very nice analogy. I'm stealing it.
Evidence of god?
ZEROOOOO
I know it's old, but I still cannot believe it's the same woman in every panel. Girl looks like a different person in each pic.
The original commercial was showing different women as if to imply it works for anyone. The arrangement of the panels is different from the original ad. It looks like panels 2 and 4 are swapped. I believe there are 2 different women.
If you look at the straps on her outfit,it looks like it's two people.
That's what I was thinking. And I just noticed that in 2 of the pics the shoulder strap to her shirt is different. If it's not different women, it's at least different shirts in some of the panels
Hey, man, we're all just echoes of light bouncing around and making good vibrations as we bounce pgf of each other. Yeah, man, like, totally trippy when you think about it.
I think the inability to destroy or create matter counts as Evidence but not necesarily Proof.
It doesn't as the laws of physics as we currently know them break down at the scale and pressures involved in the very early universe.
Well, the equations that predict black holes also predict white holes, and the big bang is functionally equivalent to a white hole. And we have found black holes. So...seems like the most plausible explanation for the big bang is...it was a white hole. Still can't extrapolate backwards for the same reasons, but there are at least implicit causes of white holes suggesting there was spacetime before the big bang.
Those cosmologists would be very upset if they could read.
Is this controversial?
Well you're forgetting about the big unbang, which occurred just before the big bang and condensed all matter and energy into a tiny speck.
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