Sir Roger brings us more

[Nephew Twiddleton]

I have trouble with "before the big bang".  Anyone care to educate me?

Well, something had to exist before, right? How did that pre-bang singularity come into being and why did it suddenly expand if it was perfectly happy being a dot for an eternity before?

That said, everyone has trouble with it. People discover things that they understand but still boggle their minds.

The problem is that asking what happened "before" there was time itself is a nonsense question.  Hawking has said as much, and I try to take what he says seriously, out of all theoretical physicists.

Doesn't have to rely on our perception of time though, and at any rate the average human mind will resist such a thought anyway as not making sense. Time was meaningless at the moment before the Big Bang occured, but that doesn't mean that time didn't exist.

I'm pretty sure they have evidence that time literally was not taking place.  It's not a matter of perceiving time, it's a matter of things not happening in a temporally definable sequence.

I have trouble wrapping my mind around that on the basis that if nothing was happening, why didn't that continue? I think most people have a problem with that. It's easy enough to conceive of time not existing because nothing happens in definable sequence, but then why did something suddenly start doing something? It's in the same boat as, "why didn't that point of stuff just stay a point of stuff?"

[Jasper]

The universe has no obligation to behave comprehensibly.

[LMNO]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Nothingness is unstable.

The only proof required for this is "We're here."

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Stupid Universe! Behave!  

But, anyway, I do find this interesting, and hope that further ideas can flesh out the hypothesis more.

[Jasper]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Ha, yes.  We're the weird ones, not QM.  Us humans and our nonsense "macro level", whatever the hell that is.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Nothingness is unstable.

The only proof required for this is "We're here."

Has interesting implications for the Dark Era of the Universe (which, I can wrap my mind around)

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Nothingness is unstable.

The only proof required for this is "We're here."

Has interesting implications for the Dark Era of the Universe (which, I can wrap my mind around)

The dark era?  Was that when everyone was running around in Deathstars?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Nothingness is unstable.

The only proof required for this is "We're here."

Has interesting implications for the Dark Era of the Universe (which, I can wrap my mind around)

The dark era?  Was that when everyone was running around in Deathstars?

Comes after the Degenerate Era. Basically, black holes will have evaporated by that time, and atoms will have been torn apart and particles will be spread out and diffuse to the point where they rarely interact with each other.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Or, as a notable physcist once put it, "the quantum universe is not intuitive."

Nothingness is unstable.

The only proof required for this is "We're here."

Has interesting implications for the Dark Era of the Universe (which, I can wrap my mind around)

The dark era?  Was that when everyone was running around in Deathstars?

Comes after the Degenerate Era. Basically, black holes will have evaporated by that time, and atoms will have been torn apart and particles will be spread out and diffuse to the point where they rarely interact with each other.

I think they established that the universe is closed, so the heat death model doesn't apply.

You should be so fucking lucky.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

What about the recent evidence that the universe's expansion is accelerating?

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a closed universe.

[Don Coyote]

So....what happens to all that entropy?

[LMNO]

At the end of the universe, God shows up and tells us it wasn't actually entropy, he predestined it all.

[Jasper]

What about the recent evidence that the universe's expansion is accelerating?

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a closed universe.

Edwin Hubble is recent?

[Nephew Twiddleton]

What about the recent evidence that the universe's expansion is accelerating?

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a closed universe.

Edwin Hubble is recent?

Ok, that the universe is accelerating at rates that imply an open universe.