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To my knowledge, we also have zero evidence that they didn't exist. Nor have we ever observed matter/energy appearing out of
thin airvaccuum, so it seems unlikely to me.And to my knowledge there can't be a before time.
Oh yeah? Then where did they film The Land Before Time? Checkmat
I like how there are at least three things that are immediately recognizable as wrong with this question.
Well, everyone has a skill I guess
those are some egregious claims to not have a source.
Kompromat!
Darn. I fold.
Well, yes and no. Time is a concept derived from a change in state. There is no “real” time. If the universe before the Big Bang existed in a static state, then the concept of time itself becomes meaningless. So in that case, it would be “before time” in a sense
The state cannot have been absolutely static - if it was, the big bang would not have occurred, and the same stasis would be existing now, unchanged.
Time is an illusion
It's just a human made concept to create a reference to measure shit
Time is change, and exists whether or not we measure it.
Absolutely not, time doesn't give a shit about humans, and would happily pass without any conscious observer at all anywhere in the universe.
Duh, spacetime is a casual filter.
Well, we haven't directly observed matter appearing spontaneously in a vacuum, but we have evidence to support it does happen
My layman's understanding is that virtual particles can and do emerge from vacuum, but in ways that usually cancel out before affecting anything. Occasionally it does affect normal stuff - see the Casimir effect acting on surfaces very close together.
I personally suspect this is an explanation for dark matter and a possible origin of the universe.
If there's tiny bits of stuff and anti-stuff blinking in and out of existence, anywhere there's a big fat nothing, both halves should still exhibit gravity before blipping back out. It wouldn't show up as normal matter because it spends most of its time not existing. The vacuum really is empty... on average. It just hums with enough short-lived quantum shenanigans to have nonzero mass.
And if this follows a steep curve for distribution, then it's like blackbody radiation. A hot rock will overwhelmingly emit photon wavelengths near the peak, for any given temperature, but in theory any temperature can emit any wavelength. It just happens with vanishing rarity as you get up into the spicy photons. If vacuum will occasionally fart out a particle and antiparticle, then very occasionally it should fart out two particles and antiparticles, together. And with vanishing rarity it can theoretically fart out an arbitrary quantity of mass, alongside a negation that is presumably equal. But if that's off by a little bit - if it's allowed to be off by a little bit - then an equally arbitrary quantity of mass will remain. Even if the masses have to match exactly, they could recombine in ways that produce angular momentum and never properly rejoin. And if vacuum produces gravity, well, anything that's left will accelerate away in all directions.
On cosmic timescales it's possible that matter just kinda happens. We'd be left with the question of why the fuck that's how anything works, and where all this quantum vacuum bullshit came from. But creationist cranks would have to retreat back to the first sentence. In the beginning, there was nothing. And it was slightly heavy.