what was here before space itself was here?

Question

or other words, where did space itself come from?
i mean if you want to talk about the origin of the species?
how about the destiny of space itself? was there total
mass at one time, and it dissipated? or did some entity
get drunk and cause 'being' and 'non-being'? is 'god' himself
sober? or are we a result of his 'hangover'?

Answer 1

I like Greek philosopher Plotinus' answer of what was before...

"that essential nothing capable of becoming anything."

Fits my physical intuition of vacuum energy, etc.

Aloha

Answer 2

This (again---try searching for earlier askings of this same question) seems to be the metaphysical question of "How can something come from nothing?" Modern physics has no answer to this. Current physical speculation suggests ways of making the Universe we see from nearly nothing---inflating "false vacuum"---but there is absolutely no idea about how to make something from nothing at all.

This suggests the alternative---that the Universe is eternal. In this case, our little part of it, the 13.7 billion year old Big Bang, is a process that might have occurred in an earlier empty, or nearly empty, space. That space would have a higher vacuum energy than our vacuum, and the change in energy created our Big Bang.

Probably our idea of time is inadequate. The phrase "before space itself was here" may be meaningless, in the sense that time, as we understand it, is the same sort of stuff as space.

Answer 3

Typical good comments from Cosmo and Enufwork. For me, the problem with a true "nothing" is in considering how it could be self-consistent (stable but not just from a temporal vantage since time is a "something").

We can visualize a lack of matter/energy in a region of space, but recognize we need physical laws to maintain that status (such as conservation laws) which require mechanisms tied in with the properties of the space-time backdrop itself by which they are naturally enforced.

What now if we also remove the backdrop? A true "nothing" then would seem to have no mechanism in play to prevent "something", so would seem to be inherently inconsistent or unstable. So maybe nothing can give rise to something simply because it has no way to prevent it.

Answer 4

Time and space are aspects of the same thing, so there was no "before" relative to this universe.

Answer 5

Alt...

Answer 6

LIGHT AND SOUND