What prevents scientists from being able model what was before the Big Bang?
In: 822
Literally none of these answers answer the question.
The real answer is scientists look at light to tell us what happened in the far distant past. This is because light takes a long time to travel vast distances so looking back is literally looking back into the past. The furthest we can look back is cosmic microwave background which is what tells us that a huge big bang happened.
Problem is we cannot see behind that cosmic microwave background. In this [image](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/kardashev/images/6/6c/CMBR.webp/revision/latest?cb=20210619193524) imagine you’re standing at the “present” point and looking back into the past. You can see all the formation of galaxies and stars right up to the big bang but you cannot see behind the cosmic microwave background so it’s a mystery as to what happened before.
The simple answer is, lack of information.
Big bang is where all events start, if there are no events before it, then there is no scale to measure anything with. There is no distance, as we measure distance as the space between two object, and no time as time is the period between two events. If there is no distance and time, there is no space time. There are no dimensions to measure or evaluate anything with, atleast to the best of our knowledge. i.e. there is no physiscs here.
It also means, whatever happened before space and time may not be of any consequence to what happened after.
Imagine you saw some footsteps in the snow and you started following them backwards to see where they came from. Now imagine you find out they started in the middle of a field with a bunch of other footsteps, but all of them are pointing outward from the same central point. This is more or less how we know about the big bang in the first place. There could have been footsteps coming into the field before it snowed, or all of the footsteps could have started there from the very beginning, but we don’t have any way of knowing which possibility is true with the currently available information.
Because all that we discovered was basically reverse engineering, but we cannot reverse engineer the Big Bang. Keep in mind that even if the Big Bang theory has strong evidence to support it, is it still just a theory, so it might even not have happened after all.
You need something to base the model on. Otherwise you’re just drawing lines at random.
It’s amazing enough that we have models that go as far back as they do.
Before the big bang time didn’t even exist, … we think? Or at it didn’t function the same way. The various force fields that dictate how things interact were all combined… We think?
At a certain point it all becomes so far removed from how it is now that any attempt to figure out what it was like becomes a fools errand. Maybe there’s something that I don’t know about that we can use as a window into that time period. A sort of big bang equivalent of carbon dating? But I have yet to hear about it, so I assume (if such a thing does exist) we either haven’t discovered it yet or haven’t managed to get any interesting results out of it yet.
The Big Bang as far as we can tell is the beginning of the universe.
Why do you think there was anything to model before the Big Bang?
I believe this falls under “Questions with a Flawed Premise” or “Subjective or Speculative Questions”
The “Big Bang” is a theory that describes how the universe formed. We get to that theory by using math to work backwards from modern-day observations, like working out where a ball was thrown from by seeing it’s current speed and direction to calculate the arc it’s following.
That math tells us that time and space started from a massive expansion from a very squished state… It’s the time and space part being created that makes it difficult to say what existed before the big bang. Without time existing, what does “before” mean? Without space, what does “where” mean? We can work out what happened up to the point of the event, but the math simply doesn’t work past the beginning. The equations get negative and “imaginary” numbers that don’t make any physical sense. From our perspective, “before” simply doesn’t exist in any meaningful way.
Imagine you are standing at the edge of a cliff, looking out into the vast unknown. This cliff represents the moment of the Big Bang, and everything beyond it is what existed before it. However, instead of an open landscape, you are met with a thick fog that obscures your vision. This fog represents the lack of information and data that scientists have about what existed before the Big Bang.
Just as you cannot see what lies beyond the fog from your current position, scientists cannot observe or gather data about what existed before the Big Bang. And just as the terrain beyond the fog might be vastly different from what you’re familiar with, the conditions and laws of physics before the Big Bang may have been so different from what we understand today that it is impossible to construct a meaningful model.
In other words, the lack of information and the fundamental limitations of our current understanding make it impossible to create a comprehensive model of what was before the Big Bang.
The fact that there was no “before” the big bang. Time didn’t exist as well as space. There is nothing to model.
Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what’s north of the north pole. The question isn’t really appropriate because there is no such thing as “before”
Latest Answers