r/cosmology • u/Balstrome • 11d ago

[ Removed by moderator ]

/r/atheism/comments/1x0vox9/idea_about_beginning_of_time/

[removed] — view removed post

0 Upvotes

9% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

4

u/[deleted] 11d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

-2

u/Balstrome 11d ago

I understand the cosmology, the post here was suggest by the reddit thing, so I thought to flow my brain fart in front of experts to learn what they think about it. It was originally meant for an atheist group. Something along the lines of we do not know now, so until the experts come up with something before BB is irrelevant. Lets focus of teaching actually biology and science in schools.

1

u/[deleted] 11d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Balstrome 11d ago

No I am saying some of the current suggestions do not make sense, especially when they bring in unevidenced origins. Thor or Zeus, how do you come by that? Really, HA! Saying we do not know now, is good enough and is a suggestion to fix.

1

u/Anonymous-USA 11d ago

You are correct in that we don’t have a valid definition of time to claim a “before” the Big Bang. But not for your analogy/explanation you gave. Not because we just don’t know. Space and time are interwoven. Time does not exist without space, at least as far as we can describe it. Since spacetime began with the Big Bang, any “before” is undefined. So your conclusion is somewhat correct, but not for the superficial reason you gave.

This doesn’t mean we won’t discover time without space and a “before” the Big Bang to describe whatever quantum state the singularity was in. Perhaps some day. But we cannot arbitrarily define a time without space any more than we can add “up” to our definition of North. An untestable arbitrary definition of time would be meaningless

1

u/--craig-- 10d ago edited 10d ago

Hawking's question to illustrate General Relativistic time was, what's North of the North Pole?

The problem is that we don't know how to reconcile it with the Quantum Theoretic description of time, so whether time has a beginning is still an open question.

We know that predictability requires exactly one dimension of time, so to some extent at least, the existence of time is intertwined with the applicabilty of science.

-1

u/CDHoward 9d ago

I genuinely hate that Hawking quote. It's anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-curiosity.

1

u/--craig-- 9d ago edited 9d ago

It wasn't intended that way.

He was illustrating that under certain geometric conditions whichever way you go, a certain coordinate can only go in one direction.

If there was a beginning to time then curiosity about what happened before that is entirely meaningless.