Category: September 19 (Page 3 of 3)

In the lecture on September 19^th we discussed the big bang theory and the origin of the universe. The origin of the universe has been a big debate for decades. How did we get here? What came first? Does god play a role in the creation of the universe? Is the universe still expanding? These are all question that people have and will continue to ponder.

There are plenty of myths about how the universe and the earth were created.

One of the most popular theories about how the universe came to be is the big bang theory. In the 1920s Hubble made the observation that all of the galaxies near our own are moving away from us. Hubble further observed that when objects are moving away from us the process makes red light. The redshift of light is evidence that the universe is expanding. It is hard to grapple with an expanding universe. How big is it? Will it continue to grow forever? How does the earth compare to the always-expanding universe?

Hubble’s claim that the universe is always expanding was a new idea in the early 20^th century. Up until then many believed that the universe was unchanging. Many thought that if the universe was infinite then you should be able to see light in all directions. This theory makes a lot of sense to me. If the universe was infinite then it would make sense that light would be seen from every angle. However, some may argue that just because you can’t see light doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. There are some factors that contribute to the way we see light from earth. Some may suggest that the distance is just too long and so we can’t see light from earth. Some may argue that the light is obscured in some fashion, or perhaps because the light from the distance hasn’t reached us yet.

I recall during the lecture that the estimated time since the big bang is 13.7 billion years. I didn’t pick up on how this number came to be. It is hard for me to fathom such a large number and such a enormous amount of time. It’s hard to imagine the amount of movement and expansion that has been going on around the earth while we are held together by gravity.

Although the big bang theory is very popular, can we see evidence of the big bang theory? If the big bang theory created space and time then there literally was nothing else before the big bang. If nothing existed before the big bang, this leaves scientists and human curiosity at a stand still. Perhaps we will never know how our universe was created. The creation of the universe is a big question that many will never know the true answer to. This is not a surprise considering the difficulty around this question. Some of the world’s brightest minds couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea. For example Einstein said the universe expanding was the greatest blunder of his life.

Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds the world has ever seen, believes that the Big Bang is what created our conceptions of space, of time, of dimensionality, relativity, and everything else we could possibly imagine. According to Hawking, there wasn’t just nothing before the Big Bang: There lacked the necessary logical, temporal, and spatial frameworks for the concept of nothing to even exist. It seems counterintuitive that the Big Bang could create time itself, but if we think of time as the fourth dimension on top of our X, Y, and Z coordinates, (think about it: Everything we do happens at an X coordinate (longitude), a Y coordinate (latitude), a Z coordinate (elevation), but also at a time), it doesn’t seem too outlandish.

As such, my question is this: If Hawking is correct that there simply can’t be any discussion of “time” as it pertains to the conditions prior to the Big Bang, does it really matter where the Universe came from? And even if it does matter, how could we ever figure it out? Humans are three-dimensional creatures in a four-dimensional universe (if any physics majors are reading this, I do hope you’ll excuse my haphazard description of “time” as a “dimension”), but if none of those four dimensions even existed at the earliest stages of the Universe, then what’s there to understand?

Far be it from me to be overly fatalistic, reductionist, or intellectually lazy. I know that I’m presenting a major epistemic cop-put here, but as long as I’m playing Devil’s advocate, I think that it’s necessary to follow Hawking’s theory to its logical theoretical conclusion. Consider some questions: Did God create the Universe? No, there was no space or time in which a God could have existed to create the Universe. Did the Universe come from the implosion of another universe? No, if another universe had imploded, then that would have to have been something that preexisted our Big Bang, and “preexisting” isn’t an adjective you can use when describing a timeless and spaceless vacuum.

I hope I’m making my concern clear: If Hawking is right, then we can never, ever, ever know the origin of the Universe because every possible theory, every conceivable scientific revelation, and every last religious belief is non-verifiable. We can never know what happened prior to our universe because the very tools we use to prove and disprove hypotheses are fundamentally incapable of accounting for a paradigm that doesn’t include time, that doesn’t include space, and that probably wouldn’t even follow our anthropocentric understandings of logic.

So let’s say that the Big Bang created space. Let’s say that it created time, that it created logic, that it created everything that our thought processes ordinarily take for granted. If this is the case, then what information could we possibly be aiming for? What is there to find out? We’ll never know what happened before the Universe if Stephen Hawking is right, because the concept of “before” didn’t exist until after the Big Bang. Even if time is just a big loop, which is the possibility from which the “Boundless Theory” derives its name, then wouldn’t there have to be an indefinite break in that loop, resuming only when the Universe comes into existence?

I hope that Stephen Hawking’s theory is fundamentally incorrect in that there was such a thing as space or as time before the Big Bang. Because if he’s right, then there’s no real point in figuring out where we came from: We’ll never understand.