How come that Time and Space did not existed before the Big Bang?

Question

Yeah, how come? Of to any explosion exists there has to be air and given that the big bang was an explosion, then air and space and time shall exist before it, am I not right?

Try to teach me how to understand correctly why time and space were created at the "time" of the big bang...

tnx in antecipation, kisses to the chicks and hugs to the boys,


ie - brazil

Answer 1

You have gotten some great answers up to this point. I'd like to add yet another one...the pre big bang scenario re string/M theory.

One spin off of string/M theory is that parallel null universes are feasible. Brian Greene pictures them as slices of bread in a cosmic, N-dimensional loaf of bread. [See source.]

These are "null" universes because, as far as we are concerned, from our myopic four dimensional world (the metric, observable universe one answerer talked about), these universes exist only in higher dimensions and cannot be observed in 4D.

According to one hypothesis, based on string/M theory, two of these slices of bread collided. That collision point is called the singularity where the big bang originated. The energy such a collision could generate is one way to account for all the mass-energy postulated for our own known universe.

Of course, as pointed out by other answerers, time and other physics phenomena in null universes may not exist as we know them in metric space. Null universes are beyond our ken to understand and explain...now. But who knows, with people like Hawkings, Witten, and others attacking the cosmos and its mysteries, we might just yet unlock the nature and existence of null universes and our own.

PS: Not all explosions are chemical explosions requiring air (oxygen) to work. The atomic bomb, for example, does a really nice explosion by simply splitting atoms. The sun makes spectacular explosions by fusing (putting them together) atoms. Bottom line, the big bang is not a chemical explosion requiring oxygen.

Answer 2

The short answer is that, as hard as it to believe, it's quite possible to "have physics" without well behaved time and space. Take as an example of what's in black holes. Theoretically, time and space is figuratively "crushed" out of existence at the center of them, and yet they exist, don't they? It's just a different world going on down in there, it's just not the kind you and I are used to. Just because one finds it hard to comprehend a "cosmos" without well-behaved time and space doesn't mean it cannot exist. It merely exposes one's limitations of understanding. As an analogy, much of mathematics works with smooth manifolds with nice properties, but mathematicians have known for a long time now that there are other things like fractals and pathological topologies where one cannot even assign order and sequence, which are necessary attributes of ordinary time and space. In topology, in fact, the concept of metric spaces doesn't come in until long after a lot of other preliminaries have been assumed and established, so metric spaces are not anywhere near a "starting point". The Big Bang, then, can be seen to be the genesis of THIS ordinary metric space that we're familiar with today, but that hardly means that there was "nothing before then".

Answer 3

Don't think of the big bang as any type of conventional explosion. It was a rapid expansion of pure energy, there was no oxygen, air or even space, the big bang was pure energy which as it cooled later condensed into hydrogen. However, no one really knows what existed before the big bang, cosmologists are studying this.

Answer 4

They may have done.

There is just no way of knowing, either experimentally or theoretically.

The reason is that the big bang is a singularity - a point where the curvature of spacetime is so acute that there is no passage of time inside. There is no way of getting information from inside a singularity to outside, or of tracing the laws of physics across the boundary.

A possible way to overcome this may be to introduce imaginary time - this is the latest thread being pursued by Stephen Hawking and his colleagues - see their website.

Answer 5

An explosion does no longer require air. only like the sunlight does no longer require air for the continous exposions that it has on the floor that creates all that warmth. there replaced into area and time previously the enormous Bang. the enormous Bang replaced into an journey that happend that created the galaxies which contains all the planets and stars and all that different stuff. area replaced into there.. there only wasnt something floating via it.