What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Discussion
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/hori...
Granted, it's a bit sad that I'm watching this on a warm Friday night.
Granted, it's a bit sad that I'm watching this on a warm Friday night.
As a summary, there were two ideas (proven by lots of squiggly lines, complex maths and copious amounts of chalk):
-everything came together and bounced apart (no bang)
-everything is on two membranes that intersected
I was slightly traumatised by it as I did maths at uni and it reminded me of stuff that I sometimes have nightmares about and dream that I'm not understanding wtf is going on as I'm sitting in the lecture theatre with some maths professor waving his hands around, scribbling things on the blackboard and doing a lot of
. 
-everything came together and bounced apart (no bang)
-everything is on two membranes that intersected
I was slightly traumatised by it as I did maths at uni and it reminded me of stuff that I sometimes have nightmares about and dream that I'm not understanding wtf is going on as I'm sitting in the lecture theatre with some maths professor waving his hands around, scribbling things on the blackboard and doing a lot of
. 
Hoofy said:
threespires said:
jmorgan said:
The big suck?
That would be my guess too
Complete and ulster cobblers probably based on pure speculation but I guarantee you none of it came from the Daily Mail. That has to count for something.
jmorgan said:
OK. What if it has always existed and always will and we are missing a bit of the puzzle to see this.
Complete and ulster cobblers probably based on pure speculation but I guarantee you none of it came from the Daily Mail. That has to count for something.
I'd say you might as well ignore it unless it came from the mouth of a theoretical physics professor. Complete and ulster cobblers probably based on pure speculation but I guarantee you none of it came from the Daily Mail. That has to count for something.
Hoofy said:
jmorgan said:
Just printing off my qualifications now.
That's the easy bit. It's writing equations that make sense to very clever people that's the tricky bit.The answer to this one depends on what theory you subscribe to (and in answer to the mention of a 'god' alternative above, that doesn't help because something needs to create the god..). If you google then you'll find all the different theories mentioned. 'brane cosmology is quite nice if you want somewhere to start 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).
As for providing evidence for the theories, that's the harder part. We know pretty much for certain now how old the Universe is and how it formed from the first few moments up until today. Proving details about the first instances is difficult though, because peering back in time that far is difficult due to everything we have to look through. On this subject, there's been some fascinating work in recent years on extragalactic background light and inflation (notable BICEP2 and related experiments) - Google will again throw up loads on this.
Short answer: we don't know yet.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).As for providing evidence for the theories, that's the harder part. We know pretty much for certain now how old the Universe is and how it formed from the first few moments up until today. Proving details about the first instances is difficult though, because peering back in time that far is difficult due to everything we have to look through. On this subject, there's been some fascinating work in recent years on extragalactic background light and inflation (notable BICEP2 and related experiments) - Google will again throw up loads on this.
Short answer: we don't know yet.
Edited by RobM77 on Tuesday 23 June 10:06
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