NON-Christians: What was before the beginning of the universe?

Question

This is a question for people who don't believe in a God creating the universe, like me. I don't want any Christian answers because I won't read them (no proof, don't believe the Bible, etc.)

What was there before the "big bang"? What kind of substances were there? And how did matter come from nothing? Who made the laws of physics/probability that led to the universe being created? How did time come into being?

Answer 1

We don't know. Right now we can look at the evidence and extrapolate back 14 billion years to when the universe was very small and very hot. We're still working on that first fraction of a second. We probably will still be working for a long time. The thing with scientific knowledge is that no matter how much you know, the horizon of what you don't know grows with it. You just have to accept some uncertainty. That doesn't mean you need god or anything like that. It's okay to just not know.

Answer 2

Open your mind! Before the big bang there was the void. Energy and matter are two forms of the same thing. Energy is nothing in the sense that it has no mass and is intangible, it could be argued that matter is nothing as well. Something as large as the void could create some kind of strain that is not yet understood so it seems that everything that exists came from nothing and that, to me, is the only thing that makes sense. How else could it be? Nobody made the laws of physics they became obvious to brilliant men and women. When matter was created time began because events could now take place, that is what time is, an interval between events. I don;t want to offend you but if you believe that a supernatural being is behind all of this you are to be pitied.

Answer 3

I am not a non theist, so perhaps you will want to toss my answer also--but it will be scientifically accurate.

Time did not exist before the universe began. t=0 is the moment of the big bang. Space and time are intimately tied to one another. Mass distorts both--it stretches space and time. Ever heard of the "space-time continuum?"

Space itself also came into existence at the moment of the big bang. There was no matter at that moment. Time itself is a rather vague and meaningless concept without a metric. If you lack a rule for measuring time, what does time mean?

We have no idea what the universe was like before the first Planck Epoch, and we may never know. We lack the tools to probe that far back. However, we DO know fairly well the course the universe took subsequent to that time. We know how hot the universe was, the inflationary rate at which space expanded, the stages of decoupling of the fundamental forces, and roughly the time matter first synthesized from energy. We also know about baryon assymetry and matter dominance. Some anisotropy resulted in much more matter than antimatter.

Primordial nucleosynthesis (the original creation of matter) occurred roughly 100,000 years after the big bang, when the temperature of the universe cooled sufficiently to allow matter to exist. Before that matter, there was a quark soup, and before that, expanding energy.

The big bang model predicts initial ratios of hydrogen, helium, lithium, and trace amounts of berylium, and these values are observed in spectroscopic analysis of the most distant galaxies. This tends to confirm the inflationary hot big bang model.

Matter comes from nothing even today. It is the operating principle behind the electron tunneling microscope, and is also responsible for the Casimir Effect. The key difference is that today the amount of mass that exists over any sufficiently large volume of space remains constant. When matter is created, it is also subsequently destroyed someplace else nearby. Quantum foam.

We don't know enough about the beginning of our universe to fully explain how everything began. Our ignorance remains vast, and for theoretically sound reasons we may always be in the dark about some matters. Uncertainty is a well founded concept.

Answer 4

Just more universe. Modern Physics theories aren't ultimate. it's quite likely that as physics advance there will be a solution that does not involve a singularity so extreme such as the big bang. Remember that in the past we've had our share of singularities that did not exist: Falling by the edge of the world (when we tough it was flat) reaching the edge of the universe (when we were unable to see the bend of space time) etc. Why the idea of the big bang/big crunch should be different? I bet 200 years from now people will be laughing at how naive we were.

Answer 5

Those who say there was nothing dont fall into realistic logic.
You cannot have a baby without intercourse. and some one has to be there for it.
So to construct a Universe a base material is needed. The idea of a substance of the Aether appears the only logical alternative to explain the composition of Mass structure.
The Idea of the Aether was realisticaly put forth by Democretus who defined it as a granular system of indivisible particles.
Einstein and others have discused it at lenght but all had different ideas about it ,and Michelson was completely on the left field on the subject.
It does make sense that the substance of space came into being first as the basis to structuring mass. The first mass structure was the particle of light and then atoms were built out of light,then star structures were made. How the earth was structured I really don't know. How atoms were formed ,I dont know, how the Universe is contained into a structure =I dont really understand it.
What is the essense of life of a Human being and what makes him feel he is conscious I dont know either All I know is that he exists.
The person that seems to have an Understanding about it is Dr. Stephen Hawkins. He may be able to solve you dilemma.

Probability does not exist until an interaction occurs to cause the probality. It is a forced function that depends on the system which forces it.
Chance relates to some one who make a choice.

Time is quantity that determines how fast a process take place.
So Time to exist in the Universe had to follow the formation of the substance of space first. The reason is that is a quantity that is a function of space pressure. So the Universe in order to use time for the formation of mass(a process)required a constrain at the boundary of space.

How do we fit into Time is really a Puzzle as we have timed existence and a timed death. Why should I Exist,why me or some one else.

To answer your ideas =How does matter come from nothing?
The 2nd law of thermodynamics says with out proof="you get nothing for nothing" Do we as human arise out of nothing? wheres did my my parents come from?=they never told me.

Answer 6

Possibility one: there was nothing.
Possibility two: there was another dying universe collapsing into a singularity, the same singularity from which we were created.
Possibility three: there is a foamy sea of universes all being born. There is no way to communicate between these universes, but they are all there.

It is very easy to make matter from nothing. It happens all the time at the quantum level. Some nuclear processes rely on it. You are probably familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theorem which states delta-n * delta-p <= h-bar. The thing is that this can be rewritten as delta-E * delta-t <= h-bar. This is what permits the spontaneous generation of matter at the sub-atomic level, and would have permitted the singularity from which our Universe was born.

Answer 7

"I'm christian and I have not ever doubted God for the functional intent that there is not any different rationalization for the way the Earth developed." There are many reasons at the evolution of Earth, or the universe for that topic. Almost each faith, beyond and gift, presents an exchange rationalization on how matters got here to be. What this says to me is readily that faith could be very unreliable in answering this specified query which all of us might like to be spoke back. I am a non-believer and so is the opposite eighty five% of the arena's populace who does not suppose within the Christian God; this in itself will have to make you suppose: is what I comply with honestly the reality? You would possibly persuade your self it's precise, however on this feel, many different fans of unique religions have satisfied themselves as good.

Answer 8

Modern string theory predicts a sort of landscape with new universes "popping" into existence with their own set of unique values for the fundamental constants. Most would be empty as life could not evolve but in the few that could there would be people asking "why is our universe so special?" Also may I be the first to comment on how irritating it is when religious nuts show up where they're not invited. This is a science forum, I don't go to the religion forums and say "the big bang did it" everywhere. Have some class as you clearly have no intelligence.

Answer 9

From Stephen Hawking...
trying to ascertain what happened "before" time began is like trying to find out what is north of the North Pole, and that such questions are self-contradictory, and thus without meaning. Hawking has also stated that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect upon the present time-frame.

Answer 10

Well, an emerging theory: M-theory states that our universe was simply created by the banging together of two other universes (which appear as membranes) in the 11th dimension, therefore, new universes with their own constraints are always forming, and there are an infinite amount of them. So, technically, there could be a universe out there in which you just got the Noble Prize today... or one in which Dick Cheney is president ... ... ugh...

The oscillating universe theory (now mainly abandoned for M-theory) suggests that universes expand and contract, going through a big bang, expanding, contracting, and a big crunch, then going through another big bang...

The Multiverse theory suggests that each time a black hole forms, the matter it sucks in is spit out through a white hole in another universe, thereby creating a big bang there.