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.
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.
“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”
It's not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can't figure out what was before it.
Seems like a distinction without a difference, I sort of assumed the OP meant that is all I mean. We don't know anything before the beginning after all. Like you said.
very nice analogy. I'm stealing it.
I still think that means I have to up towards Polaris.
Evidence of god?
ZEROOOOO
I know it's old, but I still cannot believe it's the same woman in every panel. Girl looks like a different person in each pic.
The original commercial was showing different women as if to imply it works for anyone. The arrangement of the panels is different from the original ad. It looks like panels 2 and 4 are swapped. I believe there are 2 different women.
If you look at the straps on her outfit,it looks like it's two people.
That's what I was thinking. And I just noticed that in 2 of the pics the shoulder strap to her shirt is different. If it's not different women, it's at least different shirts in some of the panels
I haven't seen this meme before but the person in the upper right and middle left look the same. And the rest of the panels look like one other person. Matches with the shoulder strap another person commented on. Probably someone took two different commercials of the same product and stitched them together.
It's not the same woman. It's an interview style advertisement with 2 women. Here's the ad - https://youtu.be/1n9sLzlxPf0?si=GFUfdfBUpA5BFazE
The hot big bang is basically just "let there be light" wrapped up in science words and don't get me started on the period of rapid inflation. It's incredible to me that the bedrock of modern physics is hand-waved away to get grad students focused back on either bigger nuclear plants and bombs or more qubits.
It's incredible to me that the bedrock of modern physics is hand-waved away
Nothing is waved away. It's just a point the math breaks down, just like black holes. That all evidence so far supports the math doesn't help explaining what exactly is/has been happening there.
Fortunately the big bang isn't actually a bedrock of anything outside of cosmology and can be entirely ignored by the rest of physics.
Please start on the period of rapid inflation. I'm curious to find out what you think
There are a ton of competing models for how the early universe formed. In order to explain why the universe is so smooth and flat though, they all invoke the idea of a short (10e-37 seconds) period of time immediately following "the singularity" that is presumed to have been literally the first point. During inflation the universe blows up 100000 times in size (and correspondingly drops in temperature by the same factor) then immediately slows down to roughly the rate of expansion we see today.
There are a lot of simulations and theories about this could have worked. And I'm sure they all have lots of grounding and math and believers. But none of thr explanations I've ever heard amount to more than "when I do this funny thing, the math works and none of of us know why" and that has been the state of quantum physics for 70 years: a series of "we don't know but the math works."
In software, we call that tech debt and I feel like our current model of profit-driven science isn't capable of actually finding or reporting the answers that underly the debt-riddled results out of modern labs.
Hey, man, we're all just echoes of light bouncing around and making good vibrations as we bounce pgf of each other. Yeah, man, like, totally trippy when you think about it.
Well, the equations that predict black holes also predict white holes, and the big bang is functionally equivalent to a white hole. And we have found black holes. So...seems like the most plausible explanation for the big bang is...it was a white hole. Still can't extrapolate backwards for the same reasons, but there are at least implicit causes of white holes suggesting there was spacetime before the big bang.
Those cosmologists would be very upset if they could read.
Well you're forgetting about the big unbang, which occurred just before the big bang and condensed all matter and energy into a tiny speck.
Not a tiny speck. You're not far off however. Theoretically, before expansion, all matter and energy is contracted into an infinitely dense space. Infinite density of infinite mass and infinite energy occupied infinite space. Or at least that is the start of the big bang.
Is this controversial?
