What was around before the Big Bang?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I've never heard of an intuitive way for this question to be answered other than 'that's an impossible question to ask since there was nothing'. To my layman mind it makes me think 'okay, then where did all of the matter come from'?

[Grek]

There wasn't a before. It's like asking what page comes before the cover of a book or what's below the center of the earth.

[TarkisFlux]

There is a school of thought that argues that before the big bang there was another universe that was subject to a big crunch (and some potentially infinite number prior to that one) that resulted in our big bang and the current universe. It's a completely untestable hypothesis of course, as is any speculation of what came before there was light as we know it, and it's generally ignored because it doesn't mesh with the measured shape of the universe (which will not result in a big crunch unless we have a faulty model), but persist it does. The universe as a steady state is a hard idea to kill.

To my layman mind it makes me think 'okay, then where did all of the matter come from'?

This is actually the point where any semi-honest astrophysicist will shrug his shoulders and say "Fuck, I don't know. Go ask God or take an answer on faith or something"; we honestly have no way of even phrasing that question in any semblance of a testable way right now.

[shadzar]

E=mc^2

So that also means:

E/(c^2)=m

So before the Big Bang there was just fast moving energy that created mass.

...or so there are looking for proof of this at CERN and the LHC.

[IGTN]

The way I understand it, the answer is actually unknowable. Right at the moment of the big bang, we had a singularity, and, with physics as we understand it right now, no information can go through that kind of singularity. So if there was anything before the big bang, it got scrambled up enough as to be literally unknowable.

It's also possible (although mostly hypothetical) that entropy increasing and causality running from negative to positive time and not the other way around is also an entirely arbitrary choice outside of the aftermath of a big bang (where we are), so "before" the big bang was a void where you couldn't actually tell the difference between going forward or backward in time, and no matter which way you go might run into a universe going forward in your direction, or reverse for that matter. In more jargony talk, that means that there might be universes where cause follows effect and entropy decreases, and that, before the big bang, you can't tell the difference between that and the opposite, which we have in here.

Basically, nothing we understand in physics works at the big bang, and we have no reason to believe it necessarily works before the big bang either, so, at least as far as I understand it, conservation of mass-energy might well have been invented by the big bang; when the big bang happened, matter could have come from nothing at all.

[Caedrus]

I've never heard of an intuitive way for this question to be answered other than 'that's an impossible question to ask since there was nothing'. To my layman mind it makes me think 'okay, then where did all of the matter come from'?

The best answer is "I don't know" followed by the question "How can we use science to try to figure it out?"

The worst answer is making up some fairy tale bullshit to satisfy your crazy fear of the unknown like "My imaginary friend named Yahweh did it."

[Username17]

It is literally impossible to see before the big bang because we can only see things bouncing off of other things. So what was before there was everything that currently exists is something that nothing currently around has bounced off of, leaving no clues. Whether there was nothing at all, or merely other, different stuff is a specifically unknowable thing.

Now, getting matter from nothing is actually not that big of a trick. We do it today all the time. And that has to do with Entropy. As you've doubtless heard many times, it is the natural flow of the universe to go from overall ordered states to overall disordered states. And that's true, and it's important, and you probably are now wondering what precisely that means. Order, like heat or speed is a form of Energy. A real, measurable type of energy that you can legitimately have more or less of - a real type of energy that you can transmute into other types of energy. Other types of energy that include matter but we'll get to that in a moment.

A good way to conceptualize the energy of order is to think about dice. If the pips on two d6s add up to 10, what is the most likely conformation? Is it 5-5, or 6-4? As you are doubtless intuitively aware: rolling a 6 and a 4 is twice as likely as rolling double fives. If moment to moment you had to roll dice until you got the right number combination, you'd be rolling dice a lot less, you'd be needing a lot less energy, if you were looking for the mismatched pair. This basic reality is observable, consistent, and repeatable. Since energy can seemingly not be created or destroyed, when stuff goes from states that are equivalent to a bunch of identical dice to states equivalent to different dice that add up to the same number there is energy left over. Light, heat, and in extreme cases even extra matter escape.

Now that being said, when I say that the energy of Order is measurable, what I really mean is that change in Order has a measurable energy. Just as we can only detect things that exist by bouncing things off of them, we can only measure the energy of Order by capturing the energy that is given off or absorbed when the Order changes. Just as we can't actually get things to zero heat, we can't extract all the Order from a system either. And unlike "absolute zero" we don't even have a theoretical framework for what total entropy would even look like.

But we do have a framework for what maximum Order looks like. It's where the number of possible states for everything, everywhere is only one. It means that there are no fluctuations in energy or mass along any axis across the entire universe. In short: it's a universe with nothing in it. That's literally the highest energy state we can imagine. If such a thing existed even for an instant it would have so much energy that it would pretty much have to collapse into motion, heat, and matter. That's right, it is a physical inevitability that a universe would be created out of the strain of trying to sustain no universe.

And we can observe that effect on the small scale. When we make areas of tremendous Order by creating near perfect vacuums, particles appear in them. Not a whole universe worth of them or anything, but then we don't have the ability to make a whole universe of void either. The big question, and it should probably be capitalized as Big Question: is why matter and not anti-matter. Because when we do our small scale experiments we tend to get an anti-particle for every particle, which does not seem to explain our galaxy being full of matter and not anti-matter.

So maybe the symmetry breaks down at stupidly high energy states and there was enough more matter being generated than antimatter that as it kept being created and self annihilating in those first instants it recursively generated a universe filled almost exclusively with matter. Or maybe the antimatter and matter went in different directions and the galaxies on the far side of the universe are actually made out of antimatter and we can't tell because they are so far away. Or maybe energy states that big seriously make dimensional portals and there's a whole antimatter universe that is right "next" to ours that is slightly out of phase. We don't know. But that last set of questions is one which we are actually working on, because while we can't make as much energy as a big bang, we can focus energy on very tiny points to hopefully get kind of similar effects on the small scale.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Personally, I've never seen the importance of knowing, anyway. It's not like explaining how the big bang happened, or what happened before it is relevant to our life at this point.

[Koumei]

Because the Universe is filled with quite interesting things, and it's good to know stuff in general.

[mean_liar]

Actually, its not a fringe scientific belief that the Big Bang was not a singularity. It depends on whether you're talking to astrophysicists or quantum physicists: the singularity is a function of general relativity, but general relativity breaks down at the quantum level. Quantum gravitation descriptions of the Big Bang are really Big Crunches that avoid singularities.

[tzor]

I've never heard of an intuitive way for this question to be answered other than 'that's an impossible question to ask since there was nothing'. To my layman mind it makes me think 'okay, then where did all of the matter come from'?

Trying to visualize this can get extremely complicated. First we need to understand the evolution of the curvature of the universe. According to Einstein, space curves. According to Hawkins, time, being a dimension like space, also curves.

There are three general models of the universe, the closed universe, the open universe and the almost infinitely impossible steady state universe. Hawkins believed in the closed universe; the open universe is even more complicated to understand but might be hand waved with some general infinity mathematics.

If the universe is closed, it is closed in time as well as space. That is, if you could travel forever you would eventually meet up with yourself. Thus the Big Bang (Ugh, even I said it; the Big Bang is not T=0, but the point where the universe went from opaque to transparent some really short time after T=0) is not the “start” of the universe but a point in a closed time loop. What we also call the end of the universe is, according to Hawkins, the beginning of the universe. So what is before the Big Bang (or rather T=0) is what is before the Big Crunch, the end of the universe.

If we apply the Hawkins philosophy to the “Open Universe” we need to get a grasp at infinity. After staring at a curve of Y=1/X in college (where the value of Y approaches +infinity from the positive side approaching 0 and –infinity from the negative side approaching 0 that +infinity and –infinity were in fact the same point in infinity space. Thus the “Open Universe” is really the “Infinitely Closed Universe.”

So what is the time, in the open Universe “before” the Big Bang (or rather T=0)? That time is the time after the “Big Bang” in the negative time universe. The universe literally expands infinitely in both directions on the time scale until they meet together at infinite time.

This, of course, begs the question, because it removes it to a level we can never discuss because it can never be explored. Space and time, as Hawkins stated simply are. The universe itself has to be viewed as an abstract object that simply exists because we have no information on what exists outside the finite/infinite space time universe. (And when you get to the multiple interacting universe theory it gets stranger and stranger.) So the simple answer is that matter and energy is always conserved, because the universe simply is.

[tzor]

It is literally impossible to see before the big bang because we can only see things bouncing off of other things.

While technically it is impossible to "see" anything when the universe was "opaque" it might be technically possible to observe the evolution of the post Big Bang abnormalities and to do some degree of extrapoliation before the big bang and probably down to T=10E-43 (Temperature 10E25 K)

[tzor]

One last thought and I'm done. There is a theory of antiparticles that state that an antiparticle is a particle traveling backwards in time. Thus virtual matter/anti-matter particle pairs (normaly created from photons which is a boson) is really a closed space time loop within the larger space time universe.

[schpeelah]

So maybe the symmetry breaks down at stupidly high energy states

The matter to antimatter ratio has been calculated to be (10^10 + 1):10^10. So the difference is practically unobservable.
Source: School trip to an LHC-related exhibition I've been on last Thursday.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Actually, its not a fringe scientific belief that the Big Bang was not a singularity. It depends on whether you're talking to astrophysicists or quantum physicists: the singularity is a function of general relativity, but general relativity breaks down at the quantum level. Quantum gravitation descriptions of the Big Bang are really Big Crunches that avoid singularities.

It is literally impossible to see before the big bang because we can only see things bouncing off of other things.

While technically it is impossible to "see" anything when the universe was "opaque" it might be technically possible to observe the evolution of the post Big Bang abnormalities and to do some degree of extrapoliation before the big bang and probably down to T=10E-43 (Temperature 10E25 K)

Yeah, hence it's possible that some information came through. If the 'singularity' was imperfect then it contained information which would have informed the rest of the evolution of the universe. Just as we can look at the cosmic background to learn about the structure of the Bang itself, knowledge of the pre-Bang universe might just be waiting to be created from a better understanding of our current universe.

[shadzar]

Here is a crazy thought on the Big Bang....if nothing is making heat or moving prior to the Big Bang, then how did anything move if the current concept of "absolute zero" in which molecules cannot move, then how did th Big Bang happen without movement?

[Quantumboost]

Here is a crazy thought on the Big Bang....if nothing is making heat or moving prior to the Big Bang, then how did anything move if the current concept of "absolute zero" in which molecules cannot move, then how did th Big Bang happen without movement?

It wasn't absolute zero as we'd understand the term. The concept of "no molecular motion" is kind of fucked in the first place, since there's genuine Heisenberg uncertainty in the momentum of atoms and absolute zero is thus unachievable even in theory so long as there are actual particles anywhere.

Also, particles just spontaneously come into existence on their own, so even a "there are seriously no particles here" absolute zero won't last for any amount of time.

[shadzar]

I said it was a crazy thought. But it hasn't yet been fully disproved, so until someone builds a time machine and wants to risk going back to before there was anyplace for them to go to, ot a nanobot to go back as far as it can and send information back; all we have is cray theories.

[tzor]

Here is a crazy thought on the Big Bang....if nothing is making heat or moving prior to the Big Bang, then how did anything move if the current concept of "absolute zero" in which molecules cannot move, then how did th Big Bang happen without movement?

Heat is just a variation of energy. Thus as you get to the big bang (and eventually T=0) since the energy of the universe is constant the temperature actually approaches infinity, not zero. The temperature is so extreme that most particles we see everyday simply can’t exist in their stable form and are broken into higher energy exotic particles (like the ones we see with really big colliders). Remember once you get close enough to T=0 you enter the extreme extents of both general relativity and quantum mechanics at the same time. Remember the “Big Bang” is a part of a process of an explosion of “space time” not of matter. The energy involved was go great that it caused space time itself to rapidly expand.

[Gelare]

Remember once you get close enough to T=0 you enter the extreme extents of both general relativity and quantum mechanics at the same time.

Or both Giant Frog and something else. We're kinda still working on it.

But I was hoping to get some more sourcing than a field trip for this:

The matter to antimatter ratio has been calculated to be (10^10 + 1):10^10.

[shadzar]

Also you have to ask,which Big Bang are we talking about? The most recent one or one of the ones prior to the most recent one?

[Quantumboost]

There's no evidence for any more than one Big Bang, and we have no idea how to go about testing for one since we haven't got even the slightest idea how physics even works with energies that high (any information from before would be hopelessly scrambled if it existed at all). So the "most recent" one, since that's all we can speculate about sort of usefully.

[tzor]

Also you have to ask,which Big Bang are we talking about? The most recent one or one of the ones prior to the most recent one?

The “Big Bang” is commonly used as the event which caused the universal but non uniform 4 degree Kelvin background radiation, initially thought of as being the moment of T=0 but now understood as the moment the universe went from opaque to transparent. There is only one. Accept no substitutes.

[tzor]

While googling the matter / antimatter thing, I found some interesting reading: Dark Matter, Antimatter, and Time-Symmetry by Trevor Pitts 20 Mar 1999

[mean_liar]

While googling the matter / antimatter thing, I found some interesting reading: Dark Matter, Antimatter, and Time-Symmetry by Trevor Pitts 20 Mar 1999

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis