{"id":284,"date":"2017-09-24T01:10:23","date_gmt":"2017-09-24T05:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/?p=284"},"modified":"2017-09-24T01:10:23","modified_gmt":"2017-09-24T05:10:23","slug":"devils-advocate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/2017\/09\/24\/devils-advocate\/","title":{"rendered":"Devil’s Advocate"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0nothing<\/em> before the Big Bang: There lacked the necessary logical, temporal, and spatial frameworks for the concept<\/em> of\u00a0nothing<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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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?<\/p>\n

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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:\u00a0Did God create the Universe?\u00a0<\/em>No, there was no space or time in which a God could have existed to create the Universe.\u00a0Did the Universe come from the implosion of another universe?\u00a0<\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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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\u00a0after<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n

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I hope that Stephen Hawking’s theory is fundamentally incorrect in that there\u00a0was<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0nothing before the Big Bang: There lacked the necessary logical, temporal, and spatial frameworks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[376733],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st132origins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}