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No evidence of time before Big Bang

nature.com

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Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#11

Post by itistoday »

The jury is still out.

Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv5. However, he is not prepared to state that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model. "We have found some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model," he says.

My money's on Penrose.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#12

Post by andrewcooke »

itistoday wrote: post #11

The jury is still out. Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv5. However, he is not prepared to sta…

I only read the BC paper (Moss et al, [3]), because I knew one of the authors (and he's a smart guy). Anyway, they show that you can find triangles just as easily, and that you can find similar circles in computer-generated random data with the same properties as the background.

At the same time, Penrose likes to be controversial.

So I guess I'm saying that I'm willing to take your money...

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#13

Post by brudgers »

>"Penrose, however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead originates from before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon that saw the Universe expand to become infinitely large and very smooth. That aeon in turn was born in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a still earlier aeon, and so on, creating a potentially infinite cycle with no beginning and no end.

...Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies..."

Did that idea (turtles all the way down) really require a scientific challenge?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#14

Post by andrewcooke »

kissickas wrote: post #7
iwwr wrote: post #2

Given 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…

"No prior" is, I guess, the term he used. There's some prior probability of finding circles in "normal" noise. It's only news if there are more circles than that. And there weren't.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#15

Post by brudgers »

swah wrote: post #4

So 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" ?

>"So what is the consensus about what time is?"

Kant said time is an a priori condition of human experience. This is to say that time is how we structure experience, and not something existing as a thing in itself.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#16

Post by gasull »

Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?

I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time.

Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#17

Post by PostOnce »

The summary says they are just disputing that concentric rings of uniform temperature in the cosmic background radiation are caused by oscillations of the universe, that is, multiple big bangs.

That's not to say that there aren't oscillations, just that these aren't a reflection of them. At least that's what I got from skimming, didn't bother to read the whole thing.

It'd be a little arrogant to say with certainty what happened before the big bang. I think the headline is misleading, very misleading.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#18

Post by rorrr »

gasull wrote: post #16

Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.

> Before Big Bang there was no movement

Prove it.

It's possible there were other universes.

> there was nothing to measure time with

There was nothing inside the universe to measure time with.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#19

Post by TGJ »

gasull wrote: post #16

Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction? I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time. Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.

Wait, this guy tries to go deep and gets downvoted, while

"Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either." Gets 5 upvotes?

That makes about as much sense as this article.

Re: No evidence of time before Big Bang

#20

Post by danbmil99 »

Penrose would be a safer bet if he hadn't written "The Emperor's New Mind". Having completely flamed out on a subject I consider myself competent enough to judge him on, I'm much less willing to bet he's right in an area where I am less confident and knowledgeable.
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