If we cannot perceive the beginning of time, or what was before, is it possible that there was no beginning?

Question

The beginning of time: a big bang? sure, that's resonable, but what was before the big bang? nothingness? what is nothingness? if nothingness can be categorised, can it then be known as something? and what created nothingness? etc etc...

If life and death is the true nature of the universe, how did this nature "become"? is it consciousness, is it spiritual, is it "god"? and what created consciousness, spirituality and god?

If there was no beginning, then there is no ending, and there is only now. what i mean is, time might not be linear. everything that has happened, everything that will ever happen is condensed into "now". we can only see time in linear, as a line to follow. (the line when turned on its end becomes a dot) what if the "line of time" is a dot containing every event in universal chronology, and so everything that was, is and will be is happening all at the same time, over and over, forever? does this make sense?

you're right maliolani, i did't pay attention to that point. thanks for the tap on the head!

time is infinite, the big bang was an event that has nothing to do with time.

Answer 1

One Big Bang, or were there many?

· New theory tries to solve problem Einstein raised
· Universe may be much older, say cosmologists

James Randerson, science correspondent
Friday May 5, 2006
The Guardian

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory.

The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.

The standard big bang theory says the universe began with a massive explosion, but the new theory suggests it is a cyclic event that consists of repeating big bangs.

"People have inferred that time began then, but there really wasn't any reason for that inference," said Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge, "What we are proposing is very radical. It's saying there was time before the big bang."

Under his theory, published today in the journal Science with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University in New Jersey, the universe must be at least a trillion years old with many big bangs happening before our own. With each bang, the theory predicts that matter keeps on expanding and dissipating into infinite space before another horrendous blast of radiation and matter replenishes it. "I think it is much more likely to be far older than a trillion years though," said Prof Turok. "There doesn't have to be a beginning of time. According to our theory, the universe may be infinitely old and infinitely large."

Today most cosmologists believe the universe will carry on expanding until all the stars burn out, leaving nothing but their cold dead remains. But there is an inherent problem with this picture. The Cosmological Constant - a mysterious force first postulated by Albert Einstein that appears to be driving the galaxies apart - is much too small to fit the theory. Einstein later renounced it as his "biggest blunder".

The Cosmological Constant is a mathematical representation of the energy of empty space, also known as "dark energy", which exerts a kind of anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate.

It happens to be a googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes) times smaller than would be expected if the universe was created in a single Big Bang. But its value could be explained if the universe was much, much older than most experts believe.

Mechanisms exist that would allow the Constant to decrease incrementally through time. But these processes would take so long that, according to the standard theory, all matter in the universe would totally dissipate in the meantime.

Turok and Steinhardt's theory is an alternative to another explanation called the "anthropic principle", which argues that the constant can have a range of values in different parts of the universe but that we happen to live in a region conducive to life.

"The anthropic explanations are very controversial and many people do not like them," said Alexander Vilenkin a professor of theoretical physics at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Rather than making precise predictions for features of the universe the anthropic principle gives a vague range of values so it is difficult for physicists to test, he added.

"It's absolutely terrible, it really is giving up," said Prof Turok, "It's saying that we are never going to understand the state of the universe. It just has to be that way for us to exist." His explanation by contrast is built up from first principles.

But if he's right, how long have we got until the next big bang? "We can't predict when it will happen with any precision - all we can say is it won't be within the next 10 billion years." Good job, because if we were around we would instantly disintegrate into massless particles of light.

Answer 2

The question may be, "The beginning of what?" A horse race starts (begins) when they open the gate. And yet all the horses existed yesterday and the day before. Before the Big Bang all matter in the Universe is believed to have been compressed into a singularity of infinite density, perhaps as large as the period dotting this sentence. All the laws of physics as we know them likely did not exist. Therefore there was likely no space nor time. Was the singularity stable? We can never know because we don't know the laws that governed it. Perhaps the Universe will contract back into a singularity erasing all our clocks and start another cycle like ours; or the negative of it. A pendulum swings up to the left then up to the right passing through dead center each cycle, right? It swings from potential energy (height) to kinetic energy (speed) and back to potential energy goverened by laws of physics. A succession of Big Bangs would be a really cool way of marking Time.

Answer 3

Nobody said the beginning of TIME was the big bang. That was the beginning of the universe. Time is a constant. If the big bang was an event, then obviously it happened at a time and you can talk about before. Time is infinite in both directions, regardless of what happens to the universe.

Answer 4

Time is NOT a constant... it's a persption that helps to keep humans on the same page with one another and keep order. Even time as we know it can be perceived differently from person to person. Hence why some people say that it seemed like a day took FOREVER!

To clarify, take a dragonfly for example. After a dragonfly reaches that stage in it's life, it only survives for 1 day. Well, to that dragonfly, that one day for us was an entire lifetime for him. Of course, there's no way to definitely prove this, but it's a common idea that's thrown around.

Anyways, another thing that affects time is gravity... depending on the strength of gravity around a certain object, time is skewed. Therefore, without any gravity time really doesn't exist.

So, in conclusion, time does not really even entirely exist. It's merely an abstract idea in order to relate events with a certain place.

Answer 5

basically if the universe started with the Big Bang then anything that happened before is irrelevant because it has no effect on the universe in it's current state. I recommend A Brief History of Time or Hyperspace for better information.

Answer 6

Stephen Hawkings has lectures all about this! There was indeed a beginning, but the most important part is if there is an end? Kind of scary.

Answer 7

time was probably there before the "big bang", and i don't believe it was created by god.

Answer 8

Absolutely.....




huh?

Answer 9

Depends on what is the otherside of the black hole.