when people say the big bang was the creation of the universe, do they mean there was an infinite vast outer space that existed and the big bang happened in said space and created everything? OR do they mean there was literally just true nothingness, no space. which i guess humans cant comprehend ?? and the big bang happened which created outer space and everything in it?
if it’s the latter….how does one try to conceptualize absolute nothingness?
In: Physics
There are theories that there was a universe before the big bang (some say the expansion weakened until gravity drew it all back together into that single point). When people say the universe isnt expanding, it’s not like the water from a knocked glass spreading out across a table – there is no “table” in that edpansion of the universe. Instead of the galaxies just moving into further away parts of space, the space between gagalxies itself is what expands. So beyond the universe, there would be a true void, which humans simply can’t comprehend because all the experiences we can draw from have involved there being something. It’s like when athiests try and comprehend what happens after death: we have always been alive, and even if we’ve experienced times of lessened thought and stimuli, there has never truly been nothing
The big bang was not the creation of the universe. Anyone who says that fundamentally misunderstands what the big bang is. We cannot and make no attempt to describe or model what came before the big bang.
All it really means is that everything in the universe seems to be rushing away from a central point. If you trace back the trajectories, everything converges on that point, suggesting that everything started off in the same place before explosively racing off in all directions. We call the event that exploded everything outward from the central point ‘the big bang’, but we don’t have a lot of context for it.
We really don’t know, most of the known physics breaks down around the big bang, it is possible that the matter for the big bang could have come from a previous big crunch so the big bang is just the recent in a cycle of bangs and crunches.
There is a special term for people who say the big bang created the universe: wrong. The big bang, and more correctly cosmic inflation, says nothing about how the universe was created. It only describes the universe from a very, very early period. What happened before that isn’t described by any known theories. We will likely need a theory of quantum gravity before we can see any earlier than what inflation tells us.
The big bang was the start of space-time itself. We have no idea if there is anything else besides that since there is no way to observe it.
To answer your last question: you don’t need to. Anything that could possibly influence us in any way is within the universe as far as we can tell. That may sound a little unsatisfactory.
Not a physicist.
> how does one try to conceptualize absolute nothingness?
Would there be time in absolute nothingness ?
Then how much time would absolute nothingness last for ?
Boom.
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