What caused the Big Bang?

[dagaz]

This discussion is going off on a bit of a tangent, but notions of time are implicit in the current big bang theory, so here goes.

 

What I mean by constant motion is that, fundamentally everything is moving about at c=299792458m/s. Everything. Mass simply has some extra dynamics to it, such that it is "frozen" in a given state at the zero-state. Fundamentally then, as counter intuitive as this may seem, the universe is in static motion.

 

Everything moves at c? So I am sitting here typing away while moving at c? I thought only massless particles such as photons could travel at c. This sounds like complete baloney to me, can you provide me a reference where I might look into this further? What do you mean by mass is frozen at the zero-state?

 

Now, if you hit the stop button, so that the universe's constant motion stopped, and the state no longer changed.

 

i.e. if you could stop time?

 

It's like in sensory deprivation. Without one's senses, one can not tell time. One must have an outside reference. Otherwise all time reduces to zero, for a given state relative to itself.

 

I've actually had some quite extensive experience of sensory deprivation, and although you lose track of time, i.e. you can not tell how many hours have gone by, you still know that time is passing.

 

If we have particle 1 that has orbitial radius (relative to center) of 1, and particle 2 that has orbitial radius (relative to center) of 8, such that the distance that particle 2 crosses relative to particle 1 is 8r-1r = 7r per frame of motion. I think, some one do correct me if I have this mixed up.

 

This makes no sense to me. What does orbital radius to center mean? What does any of that have to do with time? What you have said adds up (or in this case subtracts) mathematically, but so what - they are all terms you have just made up which proves nothing.

[Michaelangelica]

 

i.e. if you could stop time

?

 

I've actually had some quite extensive experience of sensory deprivation, and although you lose track of time, i.e. you can not tell how many hours have gone by, you still know that time is passing.

Awsome! Do you wear long flowing robes and a beard?

 

any of that have to do with time? /QUOTE]

 

Time is the problem isn't it?

If there was nothing and it exploded who lit the fuse and how long was it?

 

Quantum Physics is not very intuitive

[IDMclean]

I am saying that Time is relative. Relative to what is the next question, and the answer is to motion. Hence space-time.

 

Orbitial Radius. As in orbitial systems. Where you have a circular, or elliptical path. Like in a clock, or in the movement of the planets.

 

Also I have to ask, how long were you in sensory dep for?

 

If you neglect Motion, time becomes meaningless. Time is a sequence of motion states.

 

Relative motion is a function of distance, and Time a function of relative motion.

 

[math]s^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - t^2[/math]

[math]s^2+t^2(x, y, z) = x^2 + y^2 + z^2[/math]

s = space-time Set.

t = time-set of X, Y, Z

x = direction of movement.

y = direction 90* to that of movment

z = direction 90* to that.

 

Then again I am a fool, so only a fool would listen. Because of this, the Wise always seek the wise.

 

Anyway, I say agian. Bah! Humbug. Big Bang is Creationism.

[dagaz]

I am saying that Time is relative. Relative to what is the next question, and the answer is to motion. Hence space-time.

 

OK, this I can agree with. I thought before you were saying time did not exist and was only a mental construct, perhaps I misread your intentions.

 

Orbitial Radius. As in orbitial systems. Where you have a circular, or elliptical path. Like in a clock, or in the movement of the planets.

 

Sorry, but I still fail to see what this has to do with the current discussion.

 

Also I have to ask, how long were you in sensory dep for?

 

I have done a number of ten day vipassana meditation retreats. For the first few courses you sit in a large meditation hall with everyone else, but later on they allocate you a cell to meditate in. These cells are about 2 metres long and a metre wide. They are virtually sound-proof and virtually light-proof (totally light-proof if you block out the small amount of light that comes under the door). The purpose of meditating in the cells under these conditions is so that there is nothing to distract you from the object of your meditation (either your natural breath or the sensations which arise in your body), and when you get into deep meditation four hours can pass in what seems like only an hour or so.

 

Anyway, I say agian. Bah! Humbug. Big Bang is Creationism.

 

That's exactly how I feel about it as well. Its a conundrum of the deepest level, and especially as there is so much evidence to support it. To me if you can predict something before finding it and then it turns up later on in perfect agreement to your prediction then you must be onto something.

 

Anyway, if you don't agree with the Big Bang theory, what is your view on how this all got started?

[IDMclean]

Mostly that it didn't get started. That, as hard as it is to imagine, the universe has existed. Will exist and does exist. No start, no end. This of course means I do not believe in the Equilibrium Death senario either, I think it is fundamentally flawed.

 

What I mean by Time does not exist is that it only exists in reference to motion. If you have zero motion, you have zero everything else. Time is merely a construct of rotations, or cycles about a point. Every single way you can concieve to tell time depends on some kind of motion.

 

Today I found upon a rather interesting conception of time. There is only two types of time. That which is known and that which is unknown. What we see before us this very minute is known. What happened to us "before" is known and ahead of us. The "future" then is the Unknown and is behind us, we are "walking" into the "future" with our backs turned to it. As we "walk" more and more comes into view, changing from the unknown to the known.

 

Vipassana, though intensive is not complete sensory dep. You can still distiguish details of motion from you and your surroundings. Lacking these cues you can not tell time. It drives a person mad, literally.

 

Perhaps you know my Grandmother, she is Claudia King. She died recently but she used to go to Vipassana on a rather regular basis.

 

Time, is motion critial. I have been struggling with the concept, but I believe that it is more than that, that time simply exists within the psyche, as a result of cognition, and memory.

 

Special relativity is part of general relativity, and is valid only under a limited set of conditions. The theory of general relativity provides strict rules that neither special relativity, nor any of our other theories of the universe, can violate. The problem with space-time is that general relativity tells us that there is no fundamental "metric" that can be constructed on the space-time "manifold", there is just a manifold, or perhaps no manifold at all. A space-time "metric" is a distance function that has properties similar to distance in Euclidean space and that is used for relating a number to every pair of objects in space-time, somewhat like a grid on a map is used to calculate the distance from A to B. A space-time manifold is a topological space equipped with a family of local coordinate systems that are related to each other, containing every event that ever happens.

 

A "world-line" is the history of an observer in "space-time". Space-time is essentially the history of the entire universe, containing every "event" that ever happens. Each point on the world-line is generally thought to be a real physical event at a unique point in space-time. Special relativity allows us to define a distance from the origin for all the points on a world-line, allowing the world-line to be a set of points that have physically distinguishable properties. Therefore, we can identify each of the events on a world-line as distinct points in space-time.

 

If our universe is in fact fully relativistic, with no fundamental metric, it is quite possible that in general relativity there is no sense in which we can talk about the "length" of a "world-line". It may be that we cannot even say that, given two manifolds, a world-line in one is a world-line in the other "plus an extra bit", simply because two such four dimensional manifolds with two "different" world-lines exhibit diffeomorphism invariance and represent the same physics. This would mean that the two world-lines in the two manifolds could not be distinguished from each other (similar to not being able to tell if our car is at rest or in motion). In other words, a manifold with one shape can undergo a diffeomorphic transformation into a manifold of another shape, and the laws of physics cannot be used to distinguish one from the other - you simply cannot tell which one you are in!

 

If this is a correct interpretation of general relativity, if we cannot construct a metric on the space-time manifold, it is possible that the points on a world-line cannot be thought of as representing something different from each other. It is quite possible that the only information that a particle's world-line contains is that the "particle exists". If so, there would be nothing about the world-line that describes something that exists in "time", and there would be no temporality of any kind associated with the world-line!

 

 

 

The best way to introduce our viewpoint is to ask the following question, "Assume that every object in the universe stops moving. If every object is frozen in space, does time continue to tick away?" The common sense answer is that it does. The best guess answer from quantum theorists, string theorists, and special relativity advocates is that in some sense it does. Yet the best guess answer from those who believe that general relativity should be taken literally, is that time stops when relative motion stops.

 

 

 

A few of the physicists who specifically study "space-time" go one step further and assert that general relativity does not tell us that time stops, rather Einstein's field equations tell us that on a fundamental level "time" does not exist at all! They argue persuasively that "time" is not a fundamental part of the universe, rather "time" is a quantity that is derived from the relative motion of objects in the fundamental structure we call "space". In a frozen universe there is no "time", only "space" (perhaps a different kind of space than we think it is). This is what we believe to be true.

 

Now to our viewpoint:

 

The following example describes our belief. Assume that the only objects in the universe are two rows of dominoes, row A and row B. Assume that both rows are frozen in space, no domino is moving relative to any other domino.

 

 

It is clear that in some sense "space" exists because the two rows are frozen in space. The "space" that the rows occupy appears to be quite real. Yet if in this universe we ask, "What time is it?", we cannot give an answer. There is no clock to measure time by, indeed there is no motion that we can use to define time. There appears to be nothing in the universe except the objects and the space that they occupy. We believe that time simply does not exist in this universe. Therefore space, and not time, is the fundamental observable quantity in this universe. Now assume that both rows start falling.

 

 

It is clear that we can calculate the "time" it takes for row A to fall by comparing it to the "rate" of fall of the dominoes in row B, just like we would do if we compared the falling dominoes to the motion of the second hand on a watch. It is also clear that we can calculate the "time" it takes for row B to fall by comparing it to the rate of fall of the dominoes in row A. For every one domino that falls in row A, two fall in row B. We can choose row A as our clock and row B as our ruler, and say that for every one unit of time measured by row A the dominoes fall through two units of space measured by row B. Or we can choose row B as our clock and row A as our ruler, and say that for every one unit of time measured by row B the dominoes fall through one-half unit of space measured by row A. After the dominoes start falling we define "time", and that is the point. "Time" is not a fundamental observable in our universe, only "space" is. We could not observe "time" until we derived "time" from relative motion within the observable quantity we called "space" (which is different to "distance").

 

The idea that time does not "exist" as an independent quantity would seem to be quite speculative, except for one very interesting fact. We know that Einstein's theory of special relativity (SR) describes the universe using "time". However, special relativity is not the most fundamental theory, as we said, it is derived from Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR). The tools of special relativity give us less generalized solutions that are correct only under a limited set of circumstances. In general relativity the universe is described by solutions to Einstein's field equations. Most physicists believe that a particular description of the universe is correct only if it is a solution to those field equations. The amazing fact is that Einstein's field equations can be solved without any reference whatsoever to a temporal variable of any kind, indeed the field equations may be solved without even defining "time". This astounding fact greatly increases our confidence that we live in an essentially atemporal world.

 

Quoted from: Ws5

[Michaelangelica]

Time, is motion critial. I have been struggling with the concept, but I believe that it is more than that, that time simply exists within the psyche, as a result of cognition, and memory.

Quoted from: Ws5

 

I read that as time is circular, which was the ancient celtic belief about time. You could step out of time into the middle of the circle and therfore see time past and time future.

A very sophisticated concept for a pre Quantum society.

[dagaz]

What I mean by Time does not exist is that it only exists in reference to motion. If you have zero motion, you have zero everything else. Time is merely a construct of rotations, or cycles about a point. Every single way you can concieve to tell time depends on some kind of motion.

 

Can you not also say this contrarily, substituting the words time and motion with each other:

 

What I mean by Motion does not exist is that it only exists in reference to time. If you have zero time, you have zero everything else. Motion is merely a construct of rotations, or cycles about a point. Every single way you can concieve to tell motion depends on some kind of time.

 

So by your definition, that time can not be real as it can only be described in reference to motion, than motion also can not be real as it can only be described in relation to time.

 

BTW, I did not have the pleasure of meeting your grandmother, I practice Vipassana over here in Australia.

[IDMclean]

Indeed, this is to say that Time, or space-time, is innately the same thing. That motion, translation of one system to another, is time, which is motion.

 

What we call time is simply measurements of rotation. Orbits. Cycles. Motion.

 

such that:

[math]t \propto r[/math]

[Michaelangelica]

This seemed relevant

If a little contradictory

I have yet to follow the links in the article.

http://www.the-funneled-web.com/

 

Riddle Me This: If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then how can the universe have expanded by "inflation" to billions of light years across in the first tiny fraction of a second? (June 12, 2006)

 

The answer to that question and a number of other ones on cosmology can be found at map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html It's part of NASA's WMAP website, map.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html, where WMAP = Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

 

 

So, FAQ 10:

 

 

 

If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then how can the universe have expanded by "inflation" to billions of light years across in the first tiny fraction of a second?

 

 

 

A: General relativity does require that no object can move through space faster than the speed of light.

 

General relativity also predicts that space itself can expand. Since Edwin Hubble's work in the 1920's, astronomers know that space is expanding: the larger the distance between galaxies, the faster they move away from each other. We can actually point to distant galaxies (on opposite sides of the sky) that are moving apart from each other at faster than the speed of light.

 

If space was filled only with matter, then the expansion of space would slow with time. One of the great surprises in modern cosmology is the observation that the expansion of space is accelerating with time. This implies that galaxies are moving away from each other at ever increasing speed.

 

The key idea behind inflationary theory is the notion that the universe underwent a period of accelerated expansion during the first 10-34 seconds (0.0000000000000000000000000000000006 seconds). During this inflationary period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times.

 

Is it possible to travel at warp speed? Intriguingly, there are solutions to general relativity where you can warp space around you and have space move quickly towards other objects while you "surf" the rapidly moving piece of space. However, recent studies suggest that these warp solutions are not physically realizable.

[EWright]

K-Klown,

 

You seem to suggest that time is not real, but that it is dependant upon motion. However, we have motion, and therefore we have time according to your reasoning; and therefore time must be real.

 

I agree that time is dependant upon motion. My Theory of Temporal Relativity (click signature below) talks about this. Part II will discuss more about time and motion. I'll be interested in hearing what you have to say on it.

[Coronus]

As stated by mgrpdave in this forum itself asking what caused the big band is like asking what was before the big bang.For something to be a created there must have been a Creator or some cause before the instant in question; the big bang.This question played a vital role in my head once a but then I came across thie quotation in a book by Simon Singh...

 

"What did god do before He created the Universe?

Before he created the Heaven and Earth, GOd created Hell to be used

for people such as you who ask this kind of question"

-St. Augustine....A.D.400-

 

At first glance that may look as it it's a narrow minded comment pushing aside the concept of anything before the big bang as something beyond our reach.....And in reality it is indeed beyond our perception....We can hardly grasp the concept that time did not exist before the big band so how can we speculate about something beyond the constrains of time.....Maybe it was a Big Crunch before the big Band resulting in that ever contracting and ever expanding universe....Or maybe it's god....After all we can not really doubt what we are not sure about...But maybe someday we will find the answer to that question.....But I guess not today...-sighs-

[DarkColoredLight]

I like how you made the connection of god and mother nature.

 

I've been thinking that man created Father Figure, out of the visions he had of Mother Nature.

[Coronus]

I like how you made the connection of god and mother nature.

 

I've been thinking that man created Father Figure, out of the visions he had of Mother Nature.

 

I suppose that referral was intended for what I said.

Well that little quotation is of a time(400 AD)where a cosmos or world without a god was unthinkable wasn't making a connection to god there merely connecting a statement made quite a long time ago to a modern question...:)

 

Considering the number of people asking the question of what happened before the big band I just happen to wonder weather the Quasi-steady state (even though there is a significant amount of evidence against it) model is easier to grasp?I mean it does totally put aside the question of a 'before' doesn't it.:shrug:

[Jim Colyer]

Man's intellect is limited.

[InfiniteNow]

Man's intellect is limited.

That's super, but what's your point and how exactly is it meant to apply to this thread?

[Michaelangelica]

Man's intellect is limited.

It is a far as quantum physics is concerned.

I find "Alice in Wonderland" easier to comprhend than quantam ideas

 

Some info on the big bang here

http://www.abc.net.au/science/expert/realexpert/space/

a sample:

If you could find good evidence that some star or galaxy (or anything else) was older than the 13.7 billion year estimate for the age of the universe, you would have strong evidence against the big bang and you'd win a Nobel prize and alternatives to the big bang would be popping out everywhere.

[InfiniteNow]

What caused the Big Bang?

Billions of years ago, the universe was cleanly divided into two states, vinegar and bleach. Then one day, they merged and boom. Big bang.

 

Seriously, it's known as the Heinz Chlorox conjecture. :lol: