What existed before the big bang? Something must have!

[Grahame]

Yes. The universe.

Roughly what did the universe consist of?

[Northrend]

Just watch Doctor Who! It explains it all...

[Karis]

Yeah. I learned all about 'science' from Doctor Who... *grins*

 

Graham, this isn't a trick statement. It's really very simple: you know as well as I do what the universe consists of (well the parts of it we can see and understand, anyway).

[Grahame]

Yeah. I learned all about 'science' from Doctor Who... *grins*

 

Graham, this isn't a trick statement. It's really very simple: you know as well as I do what the universe consists of (well the parts of it we can see and understand, anyway).

I know roughly what our universe consists of but when you said universe in conjunction with the Big Bang I thought you meant the cosmos i.e. all the universe's put together.

 

ADDED

 

So are you saying it was our universe that the Big Bang was responsible for, or was the Big Bang responsible for everything, i.e. all the universes?

[Karis]

Well, you're getting into religious-esque conjecture again, as there's no proof of multiple universes.

 

I'm talking exclusively about this universe (again, what we know of it).

[Grahame]

Well, you're getting into religious-esque conjecture again, as there's no proof of multiple universes.

 

I'm talking exclusively about this universe (again, what we know of it).

 

I thought there were other suns and a whole lot more than just our universe?

 

Not to worry, thanks for your time.

[onewheeldave]

So is applying human logic to something we have no understanding of; in fact.. it's even more so.

 

To acknowledge that it would be foolish to apply the laws of science(which we more commonly refer to as 'the laws of the universe' in which we exist)to the "nothing"(what ever it was)that preceded it, is most bizarre, especially since it is human logic that is being used to discredit the possibility of something having existed before the universe.

 

Therefore, if we are to consider it foolish to apply the laws of science to something that exists outside of our universe, it must be more foolish to then apply the rules of human logic to determine whether it is 'something' or 'nothing'.

 

Well, you wouldn't want to try and apply the laws of physics to absolute nothingness- as previously discussed sceince does not deal with absolute nothingness (it deals with the vacuum, which, again as previously discussed, has structure and is therefore not 'nothing').

 

Logic, however, precedes and underlies science and therefore applies to a greater range of things than does science.

 

'Nothingness', as far as I can see, falls well within the realm to which logic applies.

 

The sheer defintion of what 'nothingness' is and how it's distinguished from 'something' itself rests on logic.

[Karis]

I thought there were other suns and a whole lot more than just our universe?

 

Not to worry, thanks for your time.

 

Everything contained within our universe (other galaxies, etc) is still our universe.

 

The problem is: there might be an awful lot more going on in our universe than we know, but let's not get into that and stick to the issue of what came before the Big Bang.

 

But it's the word 'before' that's the problem here.

[onewheeldave]

I know roughly what our universe consists of but when you said universe in conjunction with the Big Bang I thought you meant the cosmos i.e. all the universe's put together.

 

ADDED

 

So are you saying it was our universe that the Big Bang was responsible for, or was the Big Bang responsible for everything, i.e. all the universes?

 

Our universe came from the/our big bang.

 

Some scientists postulate 'multiverse' theories where there are other universes which each originated from their own big-bangs- if they exist, such univerese would not be in our space time, as, according to science space-times are created in the big-bangs.

[Grahame]

My daughter when she was about eight used to have difficulty understanding how you could have less that nothing, until I explained that a debtor not only had no money of their own but they owed other people money, i.e. they had less than nothing. However you cannot 'have' less than nothing because it doesn't exist apart from the debt of course which always exists until it is paid off.

 

So, isn't nothing simply a marker like zero, for example a hole in the ground is nothing but it exists due to the surrounding soil existing.

 

So to summarise, nothing exists because something else does.