We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know • Hacker News Board

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#31

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #25

I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything cam…

Why does there have to be time before The Big Bang?

IIUC, the hypothesis is that everything was packed into one super-dense black hole.

Wouldn't there not be any time?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#32

Post by tadfisher » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

philipov wrote: post #13

erlend_sh wrote: post #7

What we do know is that the universe didn’t begin from nothing . It’s impossible for something to arise out of nothing, so there has always been something . Nothingness is the space that holds everything. From there it can be argued that the universe began with the adjacent possible of nothing.

It's not impossible for something to arise out of nothing. Well, what I really should say is, it's not impossible for two somethings to arise out of nothing, as long as they have opposite charge and annihilate when they come into contact. I like to imagine there's an anti-universe moving backwards in time from the start of the universe, and that's where all the unexplained missing baryonic antimatter ended up.

So the universe is a crazy huge Feynman diagram that got split at the edge of a black hole? Cool.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#33

Post by gibsonf1 » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

What if it never began and has simply always existed? That is the likely scenario, as the moment you think about it beginning, you again face beginning from what? What was that called before the universe other than the universe?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#34

Post by conviencefee999 » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #25

I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything cam…

Please stop construing your religious beliefs with sciences. Sometimes the answer is simply we do not know.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#35

Post by consp » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

neffy wrote: post #14

jacquesm wrote: post #2

"The issue is that physicists can’t accept the scientifically honest answer: We don’t know, and leave it at that." This sentence jumped out for me. Is there some kind of crusade going on that I have missed the beginning of? This feels like a strange sentence in this piece and feels like a (misguided) attack.

Early pixel blob analysis (I don't know a better way to put this, check Figure 5 in the paper) from the James Webb: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating so…

Haven't read the article but I remember some mentioning these analysis are quite useless without spectra. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain this.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#36

Post by kevinventullo » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21

I think that this is the TL;DR of the whole piece: > So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.

The key difference from religion being the word “could”.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#37

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

> So if you read yet another headline about some physicist who thinks our universe could have begun this way or that way, you should really read this as a creation myth written in the language of mathematics.

I thought that was very insightful. Today people try to pawn of all sorts of opinions as “science” by covering them with the language of science.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#38

Post by jahnu » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #25

I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything cam…

> We have a simple to state problem. There was nothing, then there was something.

Natural language is woefully inadequate to express these issues, but believe it is a mistake to state the problem like this. There can be no concept of “before” if there is a T0. Perhaps the “why is there something rather than nothing?” version comes closer to what we are asking.

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#39

Post by webmobdev » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

Ninjinka wrote: post #10

God

Which one? The Hindu / Buddhist / Sufi Islamist philosophy of everyone being connected and being reborn / recycled comes pretty close to the scientific postulation that "energy is constant and can neither be created nor destroyed but only converted from one form to another". So when we die, our energy conserved in our body becomes something else. The caveat of the first law of thermodynamic is that all this happens only "in a closed system". So is God within this system, a part of the system and part of the energy in this system (which would mean that when we attain Moksha / Nirvana and escape the cycle of rebirth / reconversion, we become a part of God)?. Or is God outside this system?

Re: We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know

#40

Post by treeman79 » Sat, Aug 27, 2022, 2:29 PM UTC

ThinkBeat wrote: post #25

I dont think we can get there. First, we would need to solve time. I am not sure if we are able to grasp it. Then we must figure out what happened at T-1 or T-2, which I think will be simple once we understand time. The theory creates a start and then explains the progress from there. but not what caused it. In theory of the cylinder than the universe travels to that is good but it does not explain how everything cam…

Watching tons of PBS Spacetime the only theories oI see is that Universes are constantly being created with different properties, with an externally rare one having the right conditions for life to be possible.

Still leaves the same questions as to why a bunch of universes are being created or where the energy comes from.

End of day there isn’t anything I’ve seen other then a true all powerful God or equivalent being responsible.