h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I suppose one could posit that a collapsing universe reached critical mass, resulting in the big bang and the current, expanding universe. Conceivably, there have been many iterations of this cycle, maybe even an infinite loop. But I think the original question is more existential than may be answered with this theory. To wit, what existed at the very beginning of everything, and how did it come to be? Divine creation seems a facile answer, since there's no good reason to exempt God from the very same question of, "Who/what created it/Him?" Theistically or not, one is stuck for an ultimate answer to questions posed by preceding answers.

Clearly then, the only sanity-preserving solution is to apply a simple mathematical proof to the literal question at hand. That is, if 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, and if the Universe began with the big bang, then "what was before the big bang" could only be one thing: 41. QED.

an infinite number of big bangs each seperated by billions of years of boredom. no one will be around for the next one. !

If you define God as "that which had no beginning", then you have an answer. Then there's a good reason to exempt God from the question "who/what created it/him", namely the definition itself. It doesn't get us very far, but it does provide a platform: one can look into the question of what sort of being this God might be.

Probably half a glass of cheap wine laced wi' sleeping tablets! :0)

But seriously!!! Having been brought up and told that God cures all our ills I ask, " Why then do we read in the Bible that the sins of the Fathers will be visited upon his children, yet in another chapter we read that all children are born innocent.
Why then if they are innocent are some born deformed or without sight or deaf or still born after the many prayers given up to God asking for a safe delivery.

If there is a flood many people are drowned despite the fact that people prayed to God for safety.

If one looks at some of these facts it would appear that nature is the true giver of life and not someone needing a shave and a haircut cruising in outer space on cloud Nine waving a sheep grabbing hook.

Nighty night y'all.:0)

a smaller bang?

Apr 1 st 2006 gosh!

Its my own guess that the universe was never smaller than it was at terminus of the inflationary epoch.

The discovery of cosmic voids back in the seventies suggests that there was not just one big bang explosion, but many of them, as many of them as there are cosmic voids (local centers of cosmological expansion).

Concept: a substantial number of immense black holes drift inside a critical locus so that a secondary event horizon forms around them with the consequence that their primary event horizons collapse in a contracting phase of the Universe.

In conditions like this, under Einstein's rubber sheet model, many of the conditions we take for granted in our present epoch reverse, among them, the thermodynamic laws, which need to be taken in their reciprocals in a contracting universe, the impedance of the vacuum field, the sign of propagation of gravity.

Illustrating this in connection with Einstein's rubber sheet model, lets say one is playing a game of billiards on an expanding rubber sheet which is being stretched continuously during the play. During the time it takes the ball to travel from the point where it is initially struck, setting it in motion, to the time of impact with a second ball, the distance between the two balls increases so that after impedance there is a net thermodynamic energy loss (space dragging).

On the other hand, if one lets go, so that the elastic rubber sheet snaps back, the distance shortens over the time that the ball is in motion so that one gets a thermodynamic increase.

There is a third possible case, the iso-entropic universe, which neither expands or contracts. For illustration of this possible case, you might study the iso-entropic bouncing ball special effects from the film "Men In Black", which I personally thought extremely insightful.

Maybe a critical overload; 43. The Toltec addition posits 47.

Visualization: Posit a quantum creature with an elementary quantum equivalency about like your own freely existing in a quantum gaseous medium of elementary quanta. Next it is concentrating elementary quanta from its medium into its own substance. I think that the visualization that results may have the character of a Universal Archetype.

"Quantas Air 181, you're clear to land on runway 42..."

Before the big bang. You honestly think you will get a good answer here?

I view absolutly everything as impossible. There always has to be something (often two or more things) to make something else happen. So even if we did know what happend before the big bang, what happend before that? And can someone show me evidence that the big bang actually happend?

Evidence the big bang really happened: Cosmic Voids.

wot?

Traveller in Time without any information from before the Big Bang
"There was the Void of Nothing. An endless spaceless timeless informationless void.

Since this Big Bang the universe is one of many blobs inside this Void ever expanding into this Void. Seen from the Void the Blobs do not exist as there is no time for them to exist. Seen from the Universe there is no void as there is no cause and result. "

Everything in cosmology before Hubble time (marked by the Wilson-Penzias threshold is speculative and inferential. Its unfortunate that so many forget that and make the mistake of thinking their unsupported speculations have some basis in fact. There are some theoretical ways of seeing a little farther back in time than that founded in Einstein's relativity. Unfortunately a deep space observatory that dwarfs the International Space Station is required to make them. It won't be affordable until the manufacturing can be done on the Moon of Lunar raw materials.

On the second point, probably, but its still speculative before Hubble time, or farther away than the Wilson-Penzias threshold. Just can't see any futher than that (yet).

Cosmic Voids were discovered back in the 1970s by the Sloan Foundation in the process of constructing a three dimensional computer model of the distributions of the Galaxies. It was discovered that they are arranged in halos surrounding cosmic voids and their relationships to one another are governed by recessional velocity (acceleration in the current model) from the centers of the cosmic voids they're associated with.

Putting it another way, we've been displaced from the center of the Universe again. In the beginning, people thought that Earth was the center of the Universe, until Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo established that the Earth orbits the Sun. For a very long time people thought the stars were randomly distributed and for all practical purposes the Sun might be considered the center of the Universe. It was discovered that it was just one more star in a galaxy among a teeming population of galaxies, but as late as the discoveries of Hubble, one could still resonably suppose that the Milky Way Galaxy
was the center of the Universe. Then cosmic voids were discovered and now the Milky Way is just one more galaxy in the halo of the Bootes void, a vast, roughly spherical, expanse that apparently contains nothing at all except empty space, with about one percent of the volume of the observeable Universe.

At any rate, the way the galaxies of the Bootes halo are flying away radially from the center of the Bootes void, it certainly looks like the consequence of an immense explosion... .

"...I view absolutely everything as impossible. ..."
Myself, I swore off on believing things long ago... ... makes it a lot easy to let go of misconceptions when one has resolve like that and something better comes along.

"...There always has to be something..."

I'll be getting back to this, concept inspired by Richard Feynman.

More on the halos of galaxies surrounding Cosmic Voids: Kind of like the sparks flying away from the center of an aerial fireworks starburst.

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