“There was no time before big bang” – what does that mean?
In: Physics
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.
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