“There was no time before big bang” – what does that mean?
In: Physics
One of many unfalisifiable popsci gotchas, it’s modern mysticism just like most shit you hear in the gym and from entertainers like michio kaku and NDT. It’s something Soybob Redditpants would say to impress you and himself with his massive intellect, even though it means nothing, the runaway math it’s extrapolated from means nothing, and he can do nothing with this knowledge of the universe.
Time is the measurement of change, and before the big bang there was nothing to change because there was nothing happening.
Like, imagine turning on a computer for the first time. The processor only reads zeroes and ones, right. So before the first ‘1’ it’s all just a big ‘0’. It doesn’t matter if that zero lasted for a second or a hundred million years, because the process started with the one
How do you measure time?
We can measure by the travel of light or the decay of radioactive atoms. By events happening in sequence.
If everything is infitely close together, what does time mean? There is no distances, there’s no decay, there’s no sequence. Time at that point doesn’t mean anything.
That’s my understanding at least
I’ll give an ELI5 that doesn’t include the concept of ‘nothing’ being, because that’s often when comprehension stops.
Consider ‘time’ as the word we give to cause-effect. Something happens, therefore something happens, therefore something happens, and so on. There is no ‘time’ without chains of causes and effects, and the same is true for ‘space’. We exist in permanent states of things affecting things, and that’s what we call spacetime.
But, so goes the (very well founded) theory, that isn’t how the universe always worked! All current causes and effects point back towards a single event where the very concept of ‘cause and effect / spacetime’ began.
We don’t know what ‘was’ before that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t based on cause and effect, and being fundamentally tethered to this state, it’s not likely we’ll ever be equipped to understand.
Tldr: Time is a word we use to describe the constantly changing state of everything, but this state has a clear ‘beginning’, ‘before’ which we lack the tools/minds to describe things.
The idea is that the big bang is everything and before that there was nothing. Which means time didn’t exist either. No universe, not even an empty blackness–true nothing.
Try to remember what it was like before you were born. I imagine that’s pretty close to what the universe was like “before” the Big Bang.
“What is south of the south pole” ?
The Big Bang created both space and time.
The initial event went from essentially nothing to something very large in the tiniest fraction of a second. To be precise, it expanded its volume 10^78 times in 10^(-32) of a second.
We know that as things get more dense, time around it slows down. Rewinding the Big Bang, the Universe was so dense that time stopped and space itself did not exist. There was no ‘before’ because there was no anywhere for a ticking clock nor was there anywhen for a ticking clock to exist within.
I’m going to try to add another layer to what others have already said
it’s important to keep in mind that we just don’t know some things. In the same way, people would have never comprehended computers 10,000 years ago, it’s likely that our understanding of it all will change drastically in another 10,000 years. It’s the same reason most of our science is based on “theories”. It’s what our theory is, based on our findings, but ultimately, most of science is about proving things wrong rather than proving they’re right. Because of that, it can be quite difficult to actually prove something past theory status.
I think a lot of confusion around this stems from the fact that we don’t have correct terminology to differentiate between the uses of the word ‘time’ (in addition to just being a hard to grasp concept, obviously, but beyond that).
In general, humans tend to use the word ‘time’ to describe a process behind the system that we use to measure the distance between events by a specific metric. We think about X happening and Y happening and time being a tool to describe the ‘distance’ between each event. In terms of describing the universe, ‘time’ is really just another coordinate, one directly tied to ‘space.’ It’s confusing, I think, because when you hear that there was ‘no time’ before the big bang, it’s easy to think about that in the terms that we use time to describe in a daily base; you might wonder, “Well, how long was there no time?” and quickly start to feel like that doesn’t make sense. But as a dimension, I think it starts to make sense. If you think about there not being space for events to occur in, you might think about how you can’t use a system to describe different states between events that never occurred. If one _instance_ (this is what I’m talking about, typically one would use the word ‘time’ here, but it only increases confusion because it’s not the same as the ‘time’ I’ve been talking about) is not any different than any other you compare it to, no entropy, no oscillation of any cesium atom, no change whatsoever on any level has occurred, is it actually different from any other instance? If you were to try to use it as a tool to describe the ‘space’ between events occurring, does it make sense to use it to describe two states that are exactly the same and nothing has occurred to differentiate one from the other? This is why thinking of it as a dimension rather than a descriptive tool makes sense, I think. There was no time, there was no up or down, and there was no left or right.
So this is beyond an ELI5, but then so is your question. There are theories that suggest at SOMETHING existed before the Big Bang, but string theory is beyond my comprehension and is still kind of an ongoing thing with no real answer about what, if anything, existed back then.
Outside of that, the most basic explanation of how there was no time before the Big Bang is that there was no matter (in the traditional sense) until the Big Bang happened. Time and energy cannot exist without each other. So if there’s no matter, there’s no energy, and there’s no time.
You can also get more philosophical about it – if there is no matter, then nothing exists to experience time. Therefore it cannot exist.
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