No evidence of time before Big Bang
nature.com
No evidence of time before Big Bang
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#2Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#3Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#4So what is the consensus about what time is? Is the following a valid understanding of the post title: "No evidence of stuff going on before stuff existed" ?
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#5Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#6Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.
True, but try sampling the CMB for long enough and you would find a few lines of Shakespeare in some encoding somewhere.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#7Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
I asked my astronomy teacher about this a week ago and told him the same thing you said- I asked him if it would be any harder to find concentric pentagons (if that's what they're called) in the WMAP since it is such a huge data set.
My teacher told me that he didn't read the paper, but one of his grad students read it and pointed out that the man doing the analysis of the data didn't account for the probability that those patterns would be there anyway, apparently a common mistake. I wish I knew the proper term that he used, but the semester is already over.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.
True, but try sampling the CMB for long enough and you would find a few lines of Shakespeare in some encoding somewhere.
Honestly, we have the statistical techniques needed to figure out whether a given pattern in the CMB is real or not. I'm no statistician, but folks that are can do this kind of thing for breakfast.
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#9So what is the consensus about what time is? Is the following a valid understanding of the post title: "No evidence of stuff going on before stuff existed" ?
The "consensus" is that time started at the Big Bang and there is no meaningful referent for "before the Big Bang". However, the consensus is also that the theory that says this is flawed in several known ways, not least of which is the lack of unification between quantum and relativistic gravity that you may have heard about. This is the consensus theory not because it is perfect, but because nobody has yet managed to put together an alternative that does better across the board. Really the upshot is that nobody really knows, even for small values of "know".
Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang
#10Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward patterns.
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.
Not least because of the astoundingly small number of monkeys found on Mars ...