Now" And the Big Bang

 

The universe only exists "now". Its future is yet to come and its past is but history reflected as a collection of successive previous "nows".

 

The "now” at the time of the big bang would have to have a history of previous "nows" or would have had to spontaneously come into existence. Such history could reflect a steady-state or a collapsing.

 

I find the latter more palatable. With this we could envision a universe collapsing into the Big Bang, expanding and then collapsing again into a Big Bang in a cycle having no beginning and no end.

The "now” at the time of the big bang would have to have a history of previous "nows" or would have had to spontaneously come into existence

 

You are applying your normal everyday understanding of the world with something that doesn't have to follow those rules. It's a common mistake and one that is difficult to force out of people.

Cheer up though, there are cosmologists that propose that what you describe actually does happen. Try googling "cosmology/cosmic bounce" (if you just do cosmic bounce you get a ton of video game and band references), there are many good hits there for better information.

Now" And the Big Bang

 

The universe only exists "now". Its future is yet to come and its past is but history reflected as a collection of successive previous "nows".

 

The "now” at the time of the big bang would have to have a history of previous "nows" or would have had to spontaneously come into existence. Such history could reflect a steady-state or a collapsing.

 

I find the latter more palatable. With this we could envision a universe collapsing into the Big Bang, expanding and then collapsing again into a Big Bang in a cycle having no beginning and no end.

 

Hi Asprung,

I don't see any fallacy in what you are saying---it sounds reasonable to me at least. And in line with current professional research.

 

There is a lot of current work on models which go back before the big bang episode, not only constructing models but searching for ways to test them---how to derive testable predictions.

 

A book covering the whole field is scheduled to appear in August

http://www.springer.com/astronomy/general+relativity/book/978-3-540-71422-4

Here's the table of contents:

http://www.springer.com/astronomy/general+relativity/book/978-3-540-71422-4?detailsPage=toc

 

I'm not interested in several of the scenarios in this book, so I won't buy it. It covers all the different ideas that people are researching. I am only interested in studying certain ones, and I can get the latest articles free online from the preprint archive:

http://arxiv.org/

 

But it's good to know that a comprehensive book on pre-bigbang models is coming out. It will help to get the field in perspective.

 

About the view of time as a succession of present moments, see pages 5 and 6 of:

http://pirsa.org/pdf/files/9218e873-97d5-42ba-b1c7-70e498081c43.pdf

the video lecture that goes with these notes is here:

http://pirsa.org/08100049/

 

Several decades ago the "block universe" idea was dominant, with its geometrization of time. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way.

Worldclass experts like George Ellis are pointing out that a static block universe is incompatible with quantum mechanics. Time can be geometrized only to an approximate provisional extent. George Ellis co-authored with Stephen Hawking a standard text called The Large Scale Structure of Space Time. He is the guy publishers get to write the authoritative reference-work articles on this kind of stuff. He just put out an essay on this.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/361

 

So your "succession of nows" idea looks right in step with George Ellis and other top authorities. Nothing to apologize about

These are interesting topics! Thanks for bringing up this business.

Edited February 6, 200916 yr by Martin

Thank you for the very cool resources, Martin. I'll be checking a few of these out myself as well. I've already got the Smolin video lecture queued up for viewing. I think my username betrays my personal interest in this type of work.

The idea of the cosmic bounce seems implausible to me. We can assume that such a bounce would be caused by the gravitational pull of all the universe's matter pulling it back to together into a singularity where the laws of physics as we know them are seemingly shuffled and changed randomly. This means that when the next "big bang" in the cycle occurs, the laws of physics will have inevitably changed enough to disallow another "big crunch".