Is the Idea of the Big Bang as the Beginning of the Universe Outdated?

[madness]

Does it make sense to say the universe was "created" at the big bang? If time only exists within the universe, doesn't it make more sense that the whole thing was created at once? Anselm made this point a very long time ago. Any opinions?

 

[mathman]

There are a lot of guesses as to what the universe may have been like before the big bang. There is also a related question about what may exist outside the known unverse.

 

[apeiron]

Another way of looking at it is the phase transition approach - with time being part of what crystallises out.

So "before" the big bang, there was a more chaotic stage like a vapour phase. Time, along with space, was "gaseous" - there, but in a less coherent sense of some kind.

Then the big bang is like the transition from gas to liquid, or even liquid to ice. From the instant when the transition happened, a liquid form of time and space exists - same stuff, more organised in some way.

So time "always existed" and then went through sharp transitions which made it more definite or orderly.

 

[marcus]

Hi Apeiron! Your mascot Anaximander might well be proud of us I think.

I mean proud of this generation of physicists (not necessarily us right here at PF although we do our bit too.)

Many current models of how expansion started are handled in chapters by the various experts in the collection Vaas edited. Maybe "madness" and mathman would be interested too. The table of contents has been changed:
http://www.springer.com/astronomy/general+relativity/book/978-3-540-71422-4?detailsPage=toc

We are not talking about anything so grand as "The start of the universe"
We are only talking about modern ideas about conditions before the start of expansion (popularly called 'big bang') and what may have led up to it. I will copy out the new TOC and highlight some phrases.

==quote==
- Introduction: Beyond the Big Bang.

- Cosmic Inflation: How the Universe Became Large and Plentiful.

- Eternal Inflation: Past and Future.

- The Big Bang Singularity: Conditions and Avoidance.

- Big Bounce: Beyond the Threshold of Classical Cosmology.

- The Emergent Universe: Arising from a Static State Without a Singularity.

- Quantum Cosmology: Whence and Whither.

- Quantum Origins: Gravitational Instability of the Vacuum and the Cosmological Problem.

- Island Cosmology: The Universe from a Quantum Fluctuation.

- Cosmology from the Top Down: Anthropic Reasoning and Prediction in a Quantum Universe.

- Loop Quantum Gravity and Cosmology: Avoiding the Big Bang Singularity from First Principles.

- Loop Quantum Cosmology: Effective Theories and Oscillating Universes.

- The Holographic Universe: Space and Time in String Theory.

- The Pre-Big Bang Scenario: String Theory and a Longer History of Time.

- String Gas and String Inflation: Cosmology with Extra Dimensions.

- The String Landscape: Exploring the Multiverse.- Selection of Initial Conditions: The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse.

- Cosmic Natural Selection: Status and Implications.

- The Cyclic Universe: Ekpyrosis, Dark Energy and Large-Scale Structure.

- The Arrow of Time: The problem of Cosmic Initial Conditions.

- Self-Creating Universe: A Time Loop at the Beginning.

- (Quasi)-Steady-State Scenarios: An Alternative to Big Bang Cosmology?.

- The Mathematical Universe: Eternal Laws and the Illusion of Time.

- Eternal Existence: The Furthest Future.

- Index.
==endquote==

 

[apeiron]

Singularities and bounces would represent a different ontic view of course. This would not be natural to a phase transition approach as I've argued before. Shame there are no authors attached to chapters yet as that would help identify who is lining up "on my side" here.

But I will note that Vaas as the editor is someone whose thinking I like. And Davies gives the book a big plug.

Anyway, here is a snippet of Vaas that would be sympathetic to my view.

A good paper to check here would be Vaas' Time Before Time.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0408/0408111.pdf

After wide review of other ideas, Vaas makes the Peircean-friendly argument...

Kant’s first antinomy makes the error of the excluded third option, i.e. it is not impossible that the universe could have both a beginning and an eternal past. If some kind of metaphysical realism is true, including an observer-independent and relational time, then a solution of the antinomy is conceivable. It is based on the distinction between a microscopic and a macroscopic time scale. Only the latter is characterized by an asymmetry of nature under a reversal of time, i.e. the property of having a global (coarse-grained) evolution – an arrow of time (Zeh 2001, Vaas 2002c, Albrecht 2003) – or many arrows, if they are independent from each other. (Note that some might prefer to speak of an arrow in time, but that should not matter here.) Thus, the macroscopic scale is by definition temporally directed – otherwise it would not exist. (It shall not be discussed here whether such an arrow must be observable in principle, which would raise difficult questions, e.g. in relation to an empty, but globally
expanding universe.)

 

[Willowz]

Another way of looking at it is the phase transition approach - with time being part of what crystallises out.

So "before" the big bang, there was a more chaotic stage like a vapour phase. Time, along with space, was "gaseous" - there, but in a less coherent sense of some kind.

Then the big bang is like the transition from gas to liquid, or even liquid to ice. From the instant when the transition happened, a liquid form of time and space exists - same stuff, more organised in some way.

So time "always existed" and then went through sharp transitions which made it more definite or orderly.

The Stoics, amazing chaps!

 

[madness]

Thanks for the replies. I actually posted this thread in the philosophy forum but it was moved here, which has given a different type of reply than I imagined. Suppose that we live in a "block universe", ie the universe is a 4d block including time. Then from this point of view, the universe isn't necessarily created at the beginning - the whole thing is really created at once.
The idea of time going through phase transitions doesn't make sense to me. I can only imagine this process unfolding over time, but here time is the thing which is changing. By the way I do have a mathematical physics background, I'm just posting some non-technical questions.

 

[marcus]

... the universe isn't necessarily created at the beginning - the whole thing is really created at once.
...

and could be eternal.

That is, not "created" at all, simply existent.

 

[apeiron]

The idea of time going through phase transitions doesn't make sense to me. I can only imagine this process unfolding over time, but here time is the thing which is changing.

Why is it so hard to imagine time having a development? You think of time as being a highly ordered thing, don't you? It is very strict in the way it has a directionality, a universal presence, clear causal structure.

So now you just think of a disorderly version of temporality. Time as we know it having broken down into a pregeometry, as Wheeler nicely put it. Fragmentary or fleeting scaps of temporal coherence.

Some global parameter is usually changing steadily in phase transition models. Usually some kind of thermodynamic notion of temperature. When things are hot, local kinetics overwhelm greater structure. But when things cool to the critical point, latent local properties (like charge) can suddenly overcome that disordering kinetics and all the system's locales will line up in some orderly global fashion (like the magnetisation of an iron bar).

So all we have to imagine is a hot realm of spacetime pregeometry that cools sufficiently at some point for crisply structured 4D dimensionality to condense out. As Linde suggested for instance with his chaotic inflation story.

This was of course a phase transition of an infinite inflaton field, an energy state that existed "in" space and time. So different in that regard. But many people seem quite happy with a foamy notion of spacetime itself, so why not a phase transition model for pregeometry?

Now the block time view is the one that really makes no sense to me. When development is all around us, why does this Parmidean vision hold any appeal?

Equations model the world in terms of micro-symmetry, and it is easy to understand why this reductive approach is maximally efficient. But to then believe that the macro-asymmetry of the world is just some strange perceptual illusion?

 

[madness]

Marcus - I see the question of whether the universe is eternal as entirely independent of whether it had a creation. Any "creator" would necessarily be outside of time. If you don't accept the creation as the beginning, then the infinite regress shouldn't matter.

Apeiron - the reason I can't "imagine is a hot realm of spacetime pregeometry that cools sufficiently at some point for crisply structured 4D dimensionality to condense out", is that I can only imagine something cooling over a period of time, and without time I can't imagine any cooling process.

 

[marcus]

Marcus - I see the question of whether the universe is eternal as entirely independent of whether it had a creation. Any "creator" would necessarily be outside of time. If you don't accept the creation as the beginning, then the infinite regress shouldn't matter.
...

In that case I can't see that the "creation of the universe" is very interesting. I'd be much more interested in learning about whatever physical process could have led up to the start of expansion.

And how did it get started with the temperature and expansion rate and types of matter that it did. And the kind of geometry it has.

I'd like it if those things could be traced back to conditions and process some period of time before expansion started. As some models make a stab at doing nowadays (like in that book I mentioned). Collapse and bounce models have gotten a lot of researchers interested and quite a bit of work is being done on them.

Studying, for example, a quantum cosmology bounce model doesn't have anything to do with a "creator" "creating" a possibly eternal existence "outside of time". That kind of talk is just another way of saying existence exists.

Not very interested talking about that. More interesting to try to understand how this what we see got started, and from what, and why it's this way (to the extent we can explain that) instead of some other.

 

[madness]

True, it may not be interesting from a scientific point of view, but then I posted this thread in the philosophy forum. It is certainly interesting (to some people) from a philosophical and theological point of view (I am not a theist either). I find it an interesting idea that the universe wasn't "created" at the beginning. You've probably heard the analagy between before the big bang and north of the north pole, and you wouldn't claim that the Earth was created at the north pole. Still though, it's more for me to arrange things in my head than an important scientific point.

 

[apeiron]

Madness - You are talking about Hartle/Hawking imaginary time story here. And it has its similarities with the phase transition from pregeometry I'm talking about. Spacetime asymmetry gets dissolved back into symmetry.

Of course, the north pole analogy is a tad misleading. The north pole is actually singled out (roughly I know) by the physical property of the Earth's axis of rotation. So you could tell that you were crossing this locus of rotation. And you could say that rotation was "created" from that locale in some symmetry-breaking sense.

So at the north pole, you would experience pure rotation and no translation. A step away and the extra kind of motion would begin.

Now if you want to imagine "going beyond the north pole", you would be going from a situation where you physically can know that you are rotating on the spot - because you can see you are on top of a world - to one where you are spinning in "nothing". And now you can no longer tell whether you spin (or indeed translate). Your status - to use the jargon - is vague. Indefinite, indeterminate - deeply symmetrical.

Anyway, if you want to arrange things in your head - it is excellent to be aware of the full range of alternative conceptions of cosmological "starts", then I did post on this in a thread on vagueness.

I run through the four familiar options discussed by Paul Davies, the best overview provider about IMHO, and then start the argument for a fifth option that is derived from self-organised phase transistion style modelling.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=301514

Paul Davies summed up the standard metaphysics of initial conditions in his 2006 book, The Goldilocks Enigma. The Universe must have arisen out of something. So what is that set of possible "somethings" we need to consider?

1) Nothingness: The universe (or multiverse) could have sprung into being out of pure nothingness. For some reason, there was nothing (not even time, let alone space or matter) and then an orderly world just started up, abruptly came into being. It would appear that such a world would either have to be uncaused, which would be paradoxical, or it would have to be called into being by some kind of teleological cause - a cause acting from its "future". In which case we would need a theory (a Theory of Everything) that can conjure up outcomes from absolute nothingness. Not easy.

People are often pushed towards Platonic approaches here, but even Plato was forced to allow for the existence of the chora, the formless substance that could take the imprint of his forms. His was not a pure nothingness ontology.

2) No beginning (or somethingness): Alternatively, the universe, space and time, could have been in existence exactly as we know it forever. There was no beginning, no creation event, and so no need for a model of initial conditions. Existence is infinite and uncaused. With no essential change – either development or evolution – reality just is. We would also call this the somethingness story as we are now saying there was always something there.

This would seem a failure of explanation. But we have to consider the possibility there is actually nothing there to explain. A model of initial conditions is unnecessary as there is at least one effect that never had a cause.

3) Circular logic or the Ouroboros hypothesis: An attractive way to get the best out of both the “from out of nothingness” and the “no beginnings” stories is some kind of circular approach where endings are also beginnings. Effects are also causes, but not in a “dangerous” backwards-in-time teleological sense, only in a progressive forward-moving sense.

So like the Big Crunch model of the universe, a world could have both existed forever, and also undergo periodic birth and death. Final states become the new initiating conditions without either beginning or end. And both developing and non-developing versions are possible. We can have essentially the same universe repeating cyclically, or we can have a branching tree, a spawning variety of world-lets and histories. Through the weak anthopic principle, we can then happen to find ourselves in one of the world-let branches conducive to our kind of complex physicality.

4) Everythingess: Circularity, like nothingess and no beginnings, does not really tackle the question of how something can first come to be. It inherits their paradoxical elements. So a fourth way of thinking about the issue of initial conditions is instead to jump out to a third extreme, to say that in the beginning, everything existed. There was a plenum or infinoverse. Then our own world is the result of a constraint of this infinite possibility. We are a specific subset of a realm of general being.

So think of a sculptor. He can either construct bottom-up from nothing, create by adding bits and pieces together in a void. Or he can work top-down from an everythingness, taking a block of marble that solidly represents every possible statue that could be imagined, and then chipping away to produce some actual statue.

****

So we have four distinct metaphysical positions on the initial conditions that could ground a standard model of particle physics and cosmological origins. Either it all began with nothing, with something, or with everything. Or fourthly, some more complicated mix of these ingredients that would be circular, recursive, or somehow else embed a selection principle (a final cause that hopefully does not look like the kind of final cause that physicists so dread).

And none of these four alternatives invoke the notion of vagueness. They are all crisp approaches, ones where the initial conditions are definite. Nothingness is definitely nothing. Everything is definitely everything. Something is definitely something.

So vagueness would be choice no. 5, one that Davies did not consider. Though in many ways it is close to an everythingness approach - the idea of chaotic possibility.

The claim would become not that everything "existed" but that everything was "potential".

 

[marcus]

... You've probably heard the analagy between before the big bang and north of the north pole, and you wouldn't claim that the Earth was created at the north pole. Still though, it's more for me to arrange things in my head than an important scientific point.

That "north pole" analogy died only recently like in 2005. Roger Penrose gave a talk at Cambridge in 2005 where he said that until recently (like spring 2005) he himself would have used that very analogy! Before the big bang was as meaningless as "north of the north pole" and he had even heard it on BBC television.

But it's probably not a good way to think of things, because there are now several competing ideas of straightforward causal models where something proceeds according to some causal progression (maybe even a normal idea of time) and leads to a big bang. Penrose has his own model, if you want to watch and listen let me know and I'll get the link. His mechanism is atypical, not what most people in the field study. But he draws nice pictures---he likes to cartoon with different color felt-tip pens.

Anyway, I'd toss the "north pole" analogy.

You probably do not want to scan thru current scientific papers, because too technical. But if by some strange chance you do:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY+AND+DATE+%3E+2006&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

Most papers on the list have an "abstract" or brief summary. You get this if you click on "abstract" and you get the full text if you click on "pdf".

The beginning of expansion is not simply a philosophy topic any more. Philosophy and science have to work together on that one.

For an interesting historical comparison, here is the same keyword search for the period 1990-2000. You will get the OLD quantum cosmology names:
Hawking, Vilenkin, Hartle, Linde,...
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+DK+QUANTUM+COSMOLOGY+AND+DATE+%3E1990+and+date+%3C+2000&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

The other search is for Date > 2006. So more recent research about big bang and black hole stuff. There was a generational change.