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On October 11 2012 10:14 L3gendary wrote:
Time itself was created at the big bang, according to general relativity. So to ask what happened before is meaningless since time didn't exist.
The question isn't what happened before, but how things came to be at all. "There wasn't/there has always been" sounds like what religious people say about Jebus/God/other Gods. We should criticize that response just as we should criticize a view even in favor of the BBT that can be summed up as, "because/always was/never was/stupid question." It's not a meaningless question at all.
It's the biggest mystery of life. I've given up on it, I sleep better 
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On October 10 2012 22:19 Aylear wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2012 21:51 Gloomzy wrote:
Just earlier this year Dawkins and Krauss did a discussion talk at my Uni, it was fanstastic. You lucky freaking bastard. What was the talk about?
It was nominally about his book 'A universe from nothing' but was basically him and Dawkins just talking about stuff, such as public policy on science and some philosophy of science.
Also, people in this thread should do a phil sci course, or at least have a bit of a think on what science is and what it tries to do. It's a very interesting subject.
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I thought this was a well-known thing.
The idea is that science explains the "how", but not the "why" (in the general sense).
Asking that kind of question is just something that is outside the bound of science, and is something that is separate from what sciences stands for and different from what the scientific model attempts to answer.
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On October 11 2012 11:45 MountainDewJunkie wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2012 10:14 L3gendary wrote:
Time itself was created at the big bang, according to general relativity. So to ask what happened before is meaningless since time didn't exist. The question isn't what happened before, but how things came to be at all. "There wasn't/there has always been" sounds like what religious people say about Jebus/God/other Gods.
I'm no expert (I haven't taken any classes that cover early-universe theory yet), but as far as I understand, the big bang is the answer to "how things came to be." According to our current understanding of time, there was no... catalyst, so to speak, because there wasn't anything before the big bang in order to "spark" it. Unless I'm interpreting what I know about spacetime incorrectly, there's no possible explanation for why the big bang happened... if you want a causal explanation for something, there needs to be two spacetime events, with the first "catalyst" event earlier in spacetime than the event that you're trying to explain the cause of. In the case of the big bang, there is no "before," so there's no way for it to have a cause.
edit: just to clarify, a lot of physicists are still studying the "origins of the big bang," but it's mostly centered around the Planck epoch, which is the first 10^-43 seconds of the universe's existence... the reasons things are confusing in that time has to do with a lot of quantum and theoretical physics that I am in no way qualified to explain
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On October 11 2012 12:48 corpuscle wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2012 11:45 MountainDewJunkie wrote:On October 11 2012 10:14 L3gendary wrote:
Time itself was created at the big bang, according to general relativity. So to ask what happened before is meaningless since time didn't exist. The question isn't what happened before, but how things came to be at all. "There wasn't/there has always been" sounds like what religious people say about Jebus/God/other Gods. I'm no expert (I haven't taken any classes that cover early-universe theory yet), but as far as I understand, the big bang is the answer to "how things came to be." According to our current understanding of time, there was no... catalyst, so to speak, because there wasn't anything before the big bang in order to "spark" it. Unless I'm interpreting what I know about spacetime incorrectly, there's no possible explanation for why the big bang happened... if you want a causal explanation for something, there needs to be two spacetime events, with the first "catalyst" event earlier in spacetime than the event that you're trying to explain the cause of. In the case of the big bang, there is no "before," so there's no way for it to have a cause. edit: just to clarify, a lot of physicists are still studying the "origins of the big bang," but it's mostly centered around the Planck epoch, which is the first 10^-43 seconds of the universe's existence... the reasons things are confusing in that time has to do with a lot of quantum and theoretical physics that I am in no way qualified to explain
To extend this, our general notions of time and by extent causation are woefully inadequate in discussing this material. It is quite difficult to even attempt to prove that time exists and is some linear system.
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EPT
