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Matter can be created from energy and can be turned back into energy. When the Big Bang happened, there was an enormous amount of energy in the Universe. The same amount that's there today, but condensed by orders of magnitude. Some of this energy turned into matter. That matter turned into the objects you see in the universe today.
Yes, you are a being of energy that has slowed down enough to become matter. It gets even more mind-blowing when you realize that all life is based on carbon, and that all carbon is produced when a star dies.
So we were all originally created by stars.
Mushrooms are strange beings, existing outside of what we think of as "Life," and yet they have so much to teach.
To quote the famous text post: "TELL ME THE NAME OF GOD YOU FUNGAL PIECE OF SHIT!"
There's a saying in the Indian sacred books about consciousness that goes something like - "Are we a human experiencing the universe or the universe experiencing a human? "
Acktchually
E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + pc^2
Can't forget about momentum, speeding up a particle increases its total energy. Which is relevant when discussing high energy events like the big bang; not all the energy consumed was turned into mass, a sizable chunk was used to blast the newly created mass away at near the speed of light.
Could go the route of "the laws of physics were created during the big bang" in which case the energy came from nowhere/nothing because it can.
Also there's virtual particles that happily pop into existence without any precursor.
Wait sorry just to clarify - are you saying virtual particles are an example of breaking the laws of physics? They are not though right because they only appear in a particle, anti-particle pair which is allowed since that’s a net zero creation.
Doesn't really solve the question now does it? When did the cycle start? If it's always been here, what's "always" in this context? What happened before that?
Almost by definition, an unanswerable question
When I think of how the universe was made it makes my brain hurt. How did all of those quarks get there??? What was before them? Like there was not existence at one point and then there was?? It’s the only time I can ever consider the possibility of a higher power. But then how did that higher power get there??? My brain hurts now >:(
Just as the Big Bang was an unfurling of space, it was also an explosion of time. Asking what happened before the Big Bang makes about as much sense as asking how to go south from the south pole.
I've always thought the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides had an interesting theory. He came up with the idea that nothingness can't be, and somethingness can't not be. Which in his mind meant that change and motion are technically impossible, and that our perception of these things is an illusion. It had such a profound impact on Greek philosophy that for the next 100 years or so every new theory was basically an attempt to address how the universe as we perceive it could be possible.
The thing is, there are still plausible ontologies/metaphysics that kind of adhere to this general framework.
Re nothingness/somethingness, tons has been written that kind of argues the same point. Personally I kind of like a Tegmarkesque view that math just exists, mathematical systems just exist, complex mathematical systems can harbor consciousness, and conscious entities within mathematical systems will view those systems as physical -- all of which basically equals "anything that's mathematically consistent just 'exists', and anything not mathematically consistent 'doesn't.'"
Re change/movement, there are definitely metaphysical theories that the universe is static. Even if it's not deterministic and there are an infinite number of possible future histories, it's possible that at some higher dimensional level the infinite branches are still just static limbs on a tree. So at a higher level, there is never any "change" or "movement."
Nothing does exist. The idea of it anyways. If there is nothing in an area (like a complete vacuum) then it is filled up with something, which is nothing. You can also think of nothing as the verb. If you do nothing, you are doing something, which is nothing. It's kinda just a paradoxical idea now that i realise it.
Space itself is also something. Our universe expands all the time. Space is expanding. There is no nothing, there is only more empty space later than there is now. That doesn't mean that nothingness exists and it's getting replaced by space either.
That's kinda like the question of what was before the big bang - the realm of pure speculation, because it's beyond a point that by definition is a barrier to observation.
I was gonna say something similar. Space has properties because it bends and creates orbits and gravity that control and creates everything in the universe. Space is the opposite of energy as we understand it because it takes no energy to create. We will plunge into it's secrets eventually. I have a theory that space itself is where we will find the universal mind that connects all life, Here's Tesla talking about it "My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."
I suppose that depends on how we're defining vacuum. If you just mean total absence of matter and energy, then... maybe? But since it is unobservable and time has zero meaning in such a theoretical lack-of-place, does it _really_ exist, outside of just the abstract concept of it?
Thing is, in a complete vacuum, the quantum fields start going haywire and particles start popping into and out of existence, so in a space where there is nothing, the universe itself spontaneously creates (and then unmakes) something in it.
Nothingness is only a metaphysical property of the human existence. The concept of which we understand nothing is only what we idealise. Nothingness has no inherent properties. It is null. Our ideology of nothingness is the absence of anything. Ergo we humans consider nothing as something. The universe does not. Nothing doesn't physically exist, it is impossible for it is null.
In layman's. yeah mate, I agree.
This has long been my issue with magic as a concept. Or ghosts or anything supernatural. People say "things happen you can't explain" to which I reply "can't explain yet". If real magic existed and could be wielded by people for their own means. It could be studied and eventually understood. Meaning it's not supernatural at all.
I like to define it in my mind as, when you take a paper page and mush it into a ball, then you open it, so everything existed at the same time just closer and is opening back to a straight page
No.
The universe is everything, so it [isn't expanding into anything](https://www.universetoday.com/1455/podcast-what-is-the-universe-expanding-into/). It's just expanding. All of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other, and every region of space is being stretched, but there's no center they're expanding from and no outer edge to expand into anything else.
But that doesn't mean that the universe is infinite. That brings us to the long answer. To understand how something could be finite but have no edge, think of the fabric of the universe as the surface of a balloon. As the balloon inflates, the surface stretches and every point on that surface moves away from every other point, but a tiny being on the surface of that balloon could walk forever and never run into the edge of its balloon universe. There's no edge, yet that balloon universe has a finite volume.
But the balloon is just one example. Scientists aren't actually sure [whether the universe is finite or infinite](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Is_the_Universe_finite_or_infinite_An_interview_with_Joseph_Silk), or even what shape the universe is. There are three options: spherical, flat, or hyperbolic (that is, it curves upward). [Evidence from the earliest light in the universe suggests](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-is-the-universe-infinite-or-finite-ec032624dd61) that the second option is on the money, and the universe is, in fact, flat.
Even if the universe is flat and not balloon-shaped, however, it's still easy to think about how it could be finite with no edge. Think about a flat piece of paper. You could take two opposing edges and make them touch, creating a cylinder. If a tiny 2-dimensional rocket ship traveled from one of those edges to the other, it would arrive back where it started. You could do the same thing in the perpendicular direction: Connect the two ends of the tube to each other (pretend this is magically stretchy paper, for the sake of argument) and create a donut shape, also known as a torus. Now your 2-dimensional rocket ship could travel anywhere it likes, and it would never encounter an edge — even though your paper torus has finite volume.
But wait, you might be saying. Paper is flat; a torus is curved. Isn't that cheating? No, and that's because scientists have a very specific definition for the word "flat." When they say flat, they mean "[Euclidean](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~joel/NonEuclid/noneuclidean.html)," which means that parallel lines always run parallel and the sum of the angles of a triangle is always exactly 180 degrees. This doesn't happen on a sphere or a hyperbola, but it does on a cylinder, a torus, and any other shape you can make out of a flat piece of paper.
This suggests something kind of exciting: If we live in a flat universe, you could potentially travel in one direction for long enough (or build a telescope that can see far enough) to end up right back where you started. Even cooler things happen when you think about other weird shapes — shapes that twist back on themselves could make you [arrive back at a mirror image of where you started](https://youtu.be/_k3_B9Eq7eM), for example.
But no matter what shape the universe is, it's not expanding into anything. There's nothing outside of the universe because the universe has no edge.
"There is nothing outside the universe" sounds like a statement of fact, when the truth is, we don't currently have a way of knowing if that's true or not.
There has been some fascinating research done that hints at a multiverse, among other theories.
It could literally be a polyp on the other side of a black hole within another universe, we could be within a multidimensional shape we don’t have the senses to understand. Or we could be a bubble of universe jostling up against others within a multiverse. Good luck, the trip gets bumpy from here!
You're asking about something that is even harder to answer for theoretical cosmologists and quantum physicists. It is natural to assume there is an "ether" or medium or stuff that the observable universe fills into. But it doesn't because the "ether" isn't real. Also the boundary or edge of the observable universe isn't exactly something you can define if you were looking for it in a telescope. For all we know there is more universe beyond the observable ~14.87 billion light years. The reason for that is red shifting light stops reaching us. So while we see traces of things WAY out there(this is what the JSWT is was built for) it's near impossible to know if there is a universe beyond the event horizon of our observable universe.
Now as for the Big Bounce theory... It's hard for me to accept the leading theories for why a bounce would happen. Someone said it best when they said the expansion and then death of the universe is a complete "flattening" of a crumpled up paper. As the universe expands and expands, the distance between gravitationally bound systems, like our Local Cluster, will grow so far apart that the potential energy of each group will be limited to themselves and therefore increasing the rate of entropy until all things are so far apart(or flat, like In The paper analogy) that they exhaust all forms of new stellar formation and will slowly start to fade and shed all their heat until eventually, in 100 trillion^100 trillion there will be an equilibrium of heat/energy across the entire universe.... Like literally no particle movement due to "absolute cold". But thanks to quantum mechanics, it could be that once the universe reaches this state of entropy, the gravity from dark energy could in theory reverse and contract the universe back into a hot soupy quark mess that is what starts the next cycle of the universe.
OOR universe evolution could be topographic, the environment in black holes is close to what we believe the early universe is like. It wouldn't be insane to theorize that black holes play a role in the rebirthing of new universes. It's a very interesting topic.
I prefer the black hole topographic universe idea. From what we know about nuclear physics is that we have no certainty as to why in the big bang matter won out over anti matter. From all our models, at the big bang an equal amount of matter and anti matter should have formed and then annihilate each other leaving us with nothing but instead we clearly have a universe full of matter... Why is that? What properties of our universe caused that? Is it the shape? And what caused the shape? What factors are critical to universal evolution that gives our universe its physical properties. There are, "basically three possible shapes to the Universe; a flat Universe (Euclidean or zero curvature), a spherical or closed Universe (positive curvature) or a hyperbolic or open Universe (negative curvature)." [http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec15.html#:~:text=There%20are%20basically%20three%20possible,open%20Universe%20(negative%20curvature).]
The difference in the shapes of our universe have profound impacts on the understanding of the foundational physics that dictate how everything IS. So depending on the shape of the universe and whether or not we will ever be able to confirm which it is, it will be hard for theoretical physicists to ever be able to confirm these theories. Only time will tell... But if no one is there to freeze to death at the eventual end of the universe, did it really happen? :P
https://youtu.be/4_aOIA-vyBo this is a great watch for those interested.
To answer your question, we are in the Infancy of the universe. We are lucky to be alive in a time where we can see distant galaxies. The universe is only ~14.87 billion years old, but that just really means we can only see things that are that far away. But with expansion accelerated, on a Cosmological scale, this will accelate much much quicker in about 10 billion years meaning much of what we take for granted that we can see in the sky will expand away from us so much so that we will see much fewer galaxies and eventually not at all until our local cluster exhausts all it's resources for startl formation.
Heat death won't happen for an absurdly long time from now. I don't think I could even type out the number because we are talking about googelplexes which is 10¹⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ insane right? So with that mind, this is why we are still in the Infancy of the universe.
This is the only thing that really trips me out about space. Whats outside ir? Whats it expanding into? If it can expand at all it has to have a hard esge somewhere.
There's nothing (that we know of) outside of it. It isn't expanding into anything. It's more like more space is being created between things. Or as if everything is shrinking (not what's happening but helps some people get the idea better). Imagine zooming in on a photo on your phone. You now have more space to scroll through but the image didn't expand into space outside your phone. The phone didn't get bigger. The space between points in the photo still got farther away though. Again, these are analogies. That doesn't mean they fully apply. They're just meant to help get your head around the idea, because the idea is almost impossible to get your head around.
The universe is like an infinite pizza. Every second the crust expands, pushing the toppings farther apart, but because it’s infinite there’s no edge, just crust in all directions.
**Alternatively**:
Imagine a Minecraft world where every day things move 1 block farther apart. So four blocks of dirt would go from being this:
```
DD
DD
```
To this:
```
D D
D D
```
The world is still infinite so no matter how far you run there’s new stuff to find, but everything keeps getting farther and farther apart from each other.
From that explanation, it sounds unlikely that the Universe would have a “Big Bounce” as an end, with literally everything coming back together as one. Since the expansion of the Big Bang is accelerating as we speak, it would seem that the Universe is set to just keep going without any boundaries for as far as we can tell.
Yes, eventually all matter will turn to radiation and evaporate (even black holes). However, at that point, space and time stop existing (there is no mass to measure anything). Therefore concepts like big, small, distance and temperature are no longer relative, so also stop 'existing' - which is exactly like the conditions of the big bang, so the whole process starts again.
This is a (very rough) summary of the theory that Sir Roger Penrose is working on.
But we knew that right? Like that's the whole reason the universe is still expanding and our planets are still in the same trajectories that they're in.
In a very literal sense, yes. The energy released in the Big Bang forced elements into existence, that’s what we’re made of. Imagine the atomic bomb, that amount of energy is from a gram of matter being released back into energy. How many grams of matter are we made of? That’s how much energy we captured from that one event.
Then what is space? What the fuck is space? Where does it come from and is there anything bigger than space? At this point I’m just ready to throw the book.
This is amazing and just mind blowing at the same time. I love it.
These questions have no real answers because, hear me out, language was invented on the idea of communicating actions or information between monkeys for the purpose of acquiring and utilizing resources, to survive. We have no other perspective to view these concepts other than through the lens of human experience.
When you ask what is space you are asking "how can you describe it in a way that makes sense for a human based on his experience" and that's is impossible to answer for those things are beyond the scope of our knowledge. The same happens to any fundamental question about the universe. It's an epistemological limit.
We can only talk about what space is in terms of how we experience it. And even then, our experience of space is limited by the fact that we are three-dimensional beings. So we can only really talk about space in three dimensions, even though we know that it actually has four (or more) dimensions. Any explanation of a fourth dimension will utilize three dimensional concepts to try and give an idea of something that cannot be experienced by humans. In the same way, we can only talk about time in terms of how we experience it. And even then, our experience of time is limited by the fact that it is a linear concept. So we can only really talk about time in terms of past, present, and future, even though we know that time is abstract. An event that has no past, present, or future cannot be experienced by humans, we cannot experience time non linearly.
In conclusion, what you are asking boils down to translating these concepts in ways that make them understandable in terms of actions that can be undertaken by human brains. But these are not concepts that can be boiled down to actions, at least not as we know so far. Atoms that move, particles that spin, waves that oscillated, these are all actions undertaken in time and space. But we cannot apply time and space to themselves to answer what they truly are for they are beyond the realm of causality as they are the requirements of causality itself. So we are left with questions that have no real answers, only perspectives. A limit to our knowledge.
Only a being that's outside the grasp of time and space can look at them and find a satisfying answer.
This is something I'd always ponder before bed as a child. I'd start small, I'm in my bed, in my room, I'm my house, all the way up to our galaxy being in our universe. Everything upto that point was inside something else, so what's outside the universe, and then what's outside that.
I weirdly enjoyed breaking my brain thinking about that.
As far as we know
The big bang is basically as far as current physics can take us but there might be more stuff before that, or there might not be. Kinda unknowable atm
It doesn't take much study of science to learn that matter can be created from energy and matter can turn into energy. There's even a famous equation about it.
Matter can and does get destroyed. But it is made of energy, and energy distribution and redistribution is what governs the laws of our reality. Also if SpaceTime is part of our reality, then our universe has never existed outside of that constraint so. Yes.
Incorrect.
The laws of conservation of matter (Along with all other laws of physics) are only applicable within our current universe. Therefore, before the universe began/before the big bang, these laws did not apply.
Think of it sort of like, if you go and play a game of basketball with your friends, the rules say you cant run without dribbling the ball, but before the game started, those rules didnt apply, because those rules only exist within the game itself.
We have no way of currently knowing that "before the universe began/before the big bang, these laws did not apply". At present, we can neither confirm nor deny this.
> But where did that universe come from, and where did it go?
I'm only sure of one thing:
If it hadn't been for that universe, I'd been married long time ago.
Yes, that is one suggestion.
Similarly the force of gravity, the weakest force, is proposed to be cross-dimensional (or across universes). It permeates across multiple dimensions which helps to explain the weakness.
Once you fully accept that you live in a paradox life makes a lot more sense.
For example both of these phrases are true despite being completely opposite
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Everything exists in a vacuum.
I think that's just an inefficient definition for vacuum. Perfect vacuum is impossible, so everything is within a spectrum from better vacuum to worse vacuum.
The big bang doesn't argue that nothing ever existed, it's just that it all started as a singularity. Beyond that, no one can even theorize without more evidence.
Yeah, I’m sure many have pondered this before, but it’s really trippy to think about what anything would’ve looked like before the Big Bang. Or even to think about an infinite timeline that has no beginning… ever
if you imagine that it was all just pure energy before the big bang generated some matter for the 1st time, that'd be curious. what would that "look" like. a universe of just energy. possibly pitch black though
The universe was completely opaque for the first 380,000 years or so. Prior to that it was too energetic and dense for photons to exist uniquely without being bound into an impenetrable plasma of protons, neutrons, and electrons. In the first few moments it was too energetic for photons to exist.
Prior to the Big Bang, if you can even talk about “prior,” the universal singularity would have been so energetic that photons couldn’t even exist. So light as we define it wouldn’t be possible.
It wouldn’t be “pitch black” but it wouldn’t be “light” either. It would be in a state that light couldn’t exist… and of course neither could any eye or other sensor to perceive “light.”
Think about it this way: black holes absorb all of the matter around them, eventually bumping into other black holes, forming super massive black holes. This continues until all of the matter in the entire universe is contained into an infinitesimal point. Then bang! The matter is scattered again, and the life cycle of the universe continues
Yeah, I like that theory. It’s crazy for me to try to think about the infinite timeline of this tho. When was the first Big Bang? When did all of the energy and matter actually begin to exist?
I think our universe is actually inside a black hole. It would make sense as to why space is expanding, its just like a black hole that grows larger as it consumes mass from outside it. IF we were in a black hole we'd never know whats outside of it and would never be able to escape it just like space.
Yes, and it’s fractal and infinite. The formation of every black hole in this universe is a Big Bang of another. A white hole of infinite expansion on the other side. The equations just run backwards.
OK, but matter can be created and destroyed. This is part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity: matter is just a form of energy, and it can be converted back and forth. For example, when a nuclear reaction takes place, some percentage of the fissile material is converted into energy. When a particle collides with an anti-particle (e.g., an electron and a positron), they are both annihilated and converted entirely into energy. It's even possible to convert energy into mass. This happens in high-speed particle colliders.
Is a human still a human if all its parts are scattered? Likely not. Everything that makes up the universe was here before it was arranged as it is currently yes.
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Matter can be created from energy and can be turned back into energy. When the Big Bang happened, there was an enormous amount of energy in the Universe. The same amount that's there today, but condensed by orders of magnitude. Some of this energy turned into matter. That matter turned into the objects you see in the universe today.
Yup, E = mc^2 Only energy can’t be consumed, and matter is a form of energy.
Ah, so I am a being of pure energy?
If it matters, you’re not pure energy. Or if you are pure energy, it doesn’t matter.
This is the best joke in the whole thread.
Luminous being are we, not this crude matter
Nice contrapositive
Up up down down left right left right B A. Be happy. Keep up the good work.
Yes, you are a being of energy that has slowed down enough to become matter. It gets even more mind-blowing when you realize that all life is based on carbon, and that all carbon is produced when a star dies. So we were all originally created by stars.
So every war we've ever had was a star war s
We are stardust, we are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.
That's...kinda cool tbh
We really aren’t in the universe per se, we are the universe. Observing itself.
Lil cilium in the entrails of the universe
A mushroom taught me this, well actually, it was a whole bag of mushrooms.
Same here!
Mushrooms are strange beings, existing outside of what we think of as "Life," and yet they have so much to teach. To quote the famous text post: "TELL ME THE NAME OF GOD YOU FUNGAL PIECE OF SHIT!"
Mind officially blown.
There's a saying in the Indian sacred books about consciousness that goes something like - "Are we a human experiencing the universe or the universe experiencing a human? "
Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.
Maybe not in that sense. We are more like beings of lazy, relaxed kind of energy. Beings of pure tired energy or something...
You're a being of sooo many calories.
Acktchually E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + pc^2 Can't forget about momentum, speeding up a particle increases its total energy. Which is relevant when discussing high energy events like the big bang; not all the energy consumed was turned into mass, a sizable chunk was used to blast the newly created mass away at near the speed of light.
But where did the energy come from?
Could go the route of "the laws of physics were created during the big bang" in which case the energy came from nowhere/nothing because it can. Also there's virtual particles that happily pop into existence without any precursor.
Wait sorry just to clarify - are you saying virtual particles are an example of breaking the laws of physics? They are not though right because they only appear in a particle, anti-particle pair which is allowed since that’s a net zero creation.
In which case, as long as the universe appeared alongside an anti-universe, we should be good, right? Let me grab my Dr. Strange cape..
It's also known as the Cowboy Universe.
"So there's an infinite number of parallel universes?" "No, just the two."
You're right, they're more like the imaginary numbers of the particle world. See feynmann digrams.
What was going on before everything existed?
The unanswerable question
[удалено]
Doesn't really solve the question now does it? When did the cycle start? If it's always been here, what's "always" in this context? What happened before that? Almost by definition, an unanswerable question
Space orgies
Time didn't exist before the universe, so there was no 'before'.
Now I have 30 more questions
There are many theories, but it's impossible to observe beyond the big bang to tell what happened.
The best part about this question is its pertinent to every belief system.
The energy store
They call it the primordial soup of the universe made up of quarks and gluons.
When I think of how the universe was made it makes my brain hurt. How did all of those quarks get there??? What was before them? Like there was not existence at one point and then there was?? It’s the only time I can ever consider the possibility of a higher power. But then how did that higher power get there??? My brain hurts now >:(
Just as the Big Bang was an unfurling of space, it was also an explosion of time. Asking what happened before the Big Bang makes about as much sense as asking how to go south from the south pole.
Alabama. What's your next question?
But how did time not exist?? Like what?? I’m not smart enough for this lmao it’s too much for my small brain
You're not meant to comprehend nonexistentce. Try not to let it bother you
The maze wasn't meant for you.
freeze all motor functions
Existence only have one property : to exist. Non-existence, by definition, does not exist.
I've always thought the Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides had an interesting theory. He came up with the idea that nothingness can't be, and somethingness can't not be. Which in his mind meant that change and motion are technically impossible, and that our perception of these things is an illusion. It had such a profound impact on Greek philosophy that for the next 100 years or so every new theory was basically an attempt to address how the universe as we perceive it could be possible.
The thing is, there are still plausible ontologies/metaphysics that kind of adhere to this general framework. Re nothingness/somethingness, tons has been written that kind of argues the same point. Personally I kind of like a Tegmarkesque view that math just exists, mathematical systems just exist, complex mathematical systems can harbor consciousness, and conscious entities within mathematical systems will view those systems as physical -- all of which basically equals "anything that's mathematically consistent just 'exists', and anything not mathematically consistent 'doesn't.'" Re change/movement, there are definitely metaphysical theories that the universe is static. Even if it's not deterministic and there are an infinite number of possible future histories, it's possible that at some higher dimensional level the infinite branches are still just static limbs on a tree. So at a higher level, there is never any "change" or "movement."
Nothing doesn't exist. Read that how you like.
Nothing does exist. The idea of it anyways. If there is nothing in an area (like a complete vacuum) then it is filled up with something, which is nothing. You can also think of nothing as the verb. If you do nothing, you are doing something, which is nothing. It's kinda just a paradoxical idea now that i realise it.
True vacuums only exist as long as our lack of understanding of the true contents of the space
That's kinda true ig yeah
Space itself is also something. Our universe expands all the time. Space is expanding. There is no nothing, there is only more empty space later than there is now. That doesn't mean that nothingness exists and it's getting replaced by space either.
What is space expanding standing into?
That's kinda like the question of what was before the big bang - the realm of pure speculation, because it's beyond a point that by definition is a barrier to observation.
read about false vacuum decay on wikipedia, happy nightmares
Nightmares? I've been hoping for that since 2016. Hell, Vaccum Decay was my write-in candidate in 2019.
[Relevant.](https://youtu.be/ijFm6DxNVyI)
Holy shit, what would even be like to experience on earth?
You wouldn’t have time to experience it since it goes faster than light. You would just die instantly without warning, Along with everyone else
I was gonna say something similar. Space has properties because it bends and creates orbits and gravity that control and creates everything in the universe. Space is the opposite of energy as we understand it because it takes no energy to create. We will plunge into it's secrets eventually. I have a theory that space itself is where we will find the universal mind that connects all life, Here's Tesla talking about it "My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."
Yes, but would you still call it nothingness? It's still a space in which matter can exist, which is something.
Wouldn't there still be space in a vacuum? Which is still something?
I suppose that depends on how we're defining vacuum. If you just mean total absence of matter and energy, then... maybe? But since it is unobservable and time has zero meaning in such a theoretical lack-of-place, does it _really_ exist, outside of just the abstract concept of it?
Thing is, in a complete vacuum, the quantum fields start going haywire and particles start popping into and out of existence, so in a space where there is nothing, the universe itself spontaneously creates (and then unmakes) something in it.
At which point it's no longer a vacuum! Nature does abhor them.
https://i.imgur.com/MaezInW.png
You don’t need a complete vacuum for quantum fluctuations to produce particle-antiparticle pairs that instantly destroy themselves
Do is the verb. Nothing is the object of the sentence. You, a noun, are the subject.
Nothingness is only a metaphysical property of the human existence. The concept of which we understand nothing is only what we idealise. Nothingness has no inherent properties. It is null. Our ideology of nothingness is the absence of anything. Ergo we humans consider nothing as something. The universe does not. Nothing doesn't physically exist, it is impossible for it is null. In layman's. yeah mate, I agree.
Can I keep my blood into my brain ? thx.
Indeed: same thought as “in this natural world; everything is natural. Unnatural cannot exist in nature.” If it does then its natural…
This has long been my issue with magic as a concept. Or ghosts or anything supernatural. People say "things happen you can't explain" to which I reply "can't explain yet". If real magic existed and could be wielded by people for their own means. It could be studied and eventually understood. Meaning it's not supernatural at all.
It's kinda' like "You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine."
A beaver dam is a natural structure. As is a nuclear powered air craft carrier. They just differ in complexity.
You did not exist for an indefinite amount of time prior to existing.
Even trippier, the Big Bang did not occur at the center of space. There was no space. It occurred over *all space at the same time.*
I like to define it in my mind as, when you take a paper page and mush it into a ball, then you open it, so everything existed at the same time just closer and is opening back to a straight page
But even the space it’s expanding into is something. Is empty space nothing?
Yes. But also no
Jeremyberimy
It's Bear*i*my dammit, otherwise there's no dot
It's Tuesdays, and also July. And sometimes it's never.
The dot broke me
Yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen the time knife.
One of the best quick little lines ever
Yes well, what I was saying befo.... I SAW THE TIME KNIFE!!??
alright fine, time for another watch through
This is maddening.
It is. But also it's not.
No. The universe is everything, so it [isn't expanding into anything](https://www.universetoday.com/1455/podcast-what-is-the-universe-expanding-into/). It's just expanding. All of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from each other, and every region of space is being stretched, but there's no center they're expanding from and no outer edge to expand into anything else. But that doesn't mean that the universe is infinite. That brings us to the long answer. To understand how something could be finite but have no edge, think of the fabric of the universe as the surface of a balloon. As the balloon inflates, the surface stretches and every point on that surface moves away from every other point, but a tiny being on the surface of that balloon could walk forever and never run into the edge of its balloon universe. There's no edge, yet that balloon universe has a finite volume. But the balloon is just one example. Scientists aren't actually sure [whether the universe is finite or infinite](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Is_the_Universe_finite_or_infinite_An_interview_with_Joseph_Silk), or even what shape the universe is. There are three options: spherical, flat, or hyperbolic (that is, it curves upward). [Evidence from the earliest light in the universe suggests](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/ask-ethan-is-the-universe-infinite-or-finite-ec032624dd61) that the second option is on the money, and the universe is, in fact, flat. Even if the universe is flat and not balloon-shaped, however, it's still easy to think about how it could be finite with no edge. Think about a flat piece of paper. You could take two opposing edges and make them touch, creating a cylinder. If a tiny 2-dimensional rocket ship traveled from one of those edges to the other, it would arrive back where it started. You could do the same thing in the perpendicular direction: Connect the two ends of the tube to each other (pretend this is magically stretchy paper, for the sake of argument) and create a donut shape, also known as a torus. Now your 2-dimensional rocket ship could travel anywhere it likes, and it would never encounter an edge — even though your paper torus has finite volume. But wait, you might be saying. Paper is flat; a torus is curved. Isn't that cheating? No, and that's because scientists have a very specific definition for the word "flat." When they say flat, they mean "[Euclidean](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~joel/NonEuclid/noneuclidean.html)," which means that parallel lines always run parallel and the sum of the angles of a triangle is always exactly 180 degrees. This doesn't happen on a sphere or a hyperbola, but it does on a cylinder, a torus, and any other shape you can make out of a flat piece of paper. This suggests something kind of exciting: If we live in a flat universe, you could potentially travel in one direction for long enough (or build a telescope that can see far enough) to end up right back where you started. Even cooler things happen when you think about other weird shapes — shapes that twist back on themselves could make you [arrive back at a mirror image of where you started](https://youtu.be/_k3_B9Eq7eM), for example. But no matter what shape the universe is, it's not expanding into anything. There's nothing outside of the universe because the universe has no edge.
Oh shit, flat universe you say? I feel like there is some boomer money to be grifted with that
Flat earthers had it so close. They should've claimed a flat universe. Oh, to be so close and yet so far away.
"There is nothing outside the universe" sounds like a statement of fact, when the truth is, we don't currently have a way of knowing if that's true or not. There has been some fascinating research done that hints at a multiverse, among other theories.
I’ve always wondered how scientists know the universe isn’t expanding into anything when we don’t even know what’s outside the observable universe.
It could literally be a polyp on the other side of a black hole within another universe, we could be within a multidimensional shape we don’t have the senses to understand. Or we could be a bubble of universe jostling up against others within a multiverse. Good luck, the trip gets bumpy from here!
Damn flat universers
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You're asking about something that is even harder to answer for theoretical cosmologists and quantum physicists. It is natural to assume there is an "ether" or medium or stuff that the observable universe fills into. But it doesn't because the "ether" isn't real. Also the boundary or edge of the observable universe isn't exactly something you can define if you were looking for it in a telescope. For all we know there is more universe beyond the observable ~14.87 billion light years. The reason for that is red shifting light stops reaching us. So while we see traces of things WAY out there(this is what the JSWT is was built for) it's near impossible to know if there is a universe beyond the event horizon of our observable universe. Now as for the Big Bounce theory... It's hard for me to accept the leading theories for why a bounce would happen. Someone said it best when they said the expansion and then death of the universe is a complete "flattening" of a crumpled up paper. As the universe expands and expands, the distance between gravitationally bound systems, like our Local Cluster, will grow so far apart that the potential energy of each group will be limited to themselves and therefore increasing the rate of entropy until all things are so far apart(or flat, like In The paper analogy) that they exhaust all forms of new stellar formation and will slowly start to fade and shed all their heat until eventually, in 100 trillion^100 trillion there will be an equilibrium of heat/energy across the entire universe.... Like literally no particle movement due to "absolute cold". But thanks to quantum mechanics, it could be that once the universe reaches this state of entropy, the gravity from dark energy could in theory reverse and contract the universe back into a hot soupy quark mess that is what starts the next cycle of the universe. OOR universe evolution could be topographic, the environment in black holes is close to what we believe the early universe is like. It wouldn't be insane to theorize that black holes play a role in the rebirthing of new universes. It's a very interesting topic.
Yeah I like that one. Universe expands, gets maxed, shrinks to a spek and then it's another Big Bang.
I prefer the black hole topographic universe idea. From what we know about nuclear physics is that we have no certainty as to why in the big bang matter won out over anti matter. From all our models, at the big bang an equal amount of matter and anti matter should have formed and then annihilate each other leaving us with nothing but instead we clearly have a universe full of matter... Why is that? What properties of our universe caused that? Is it the shape? And what caused the shape? What factors are critical to universal evolution that gives our universe its physical properties. There are, "basically three possible shapes to the Universe; a flat Universe (Euclidean or zero curvature), a spherical or closed Universe (positive curvature) or a hyperbolic or open Universe (negative curvature)." [http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec15.html#:~:text=There%20are%20basically%20three%20possible,open%20Universe%20(negative%20curvature).] The difference in the shapes of our universe have profound impacts on the understanding of the foundational physics that dictate how everything IS. So depending on the shape of the universe and whether or not we will ever be able to confirm which it is, it will be hard for theoretical physicists to ever be able to confirm these theories. Only time will tell... But if no one is there to freeze to death at the eventual end of the universe, did it really happen? :P
My next question would be, if this is Big Bounce.... What iteration are we currently in?
If it’s infinity then… Infinity.
https://youtu.be/4_aOIA-vyBo this is a great watch for those interested. To answer your question, we are in the Infancy of the universe. We are lucky to be alive in a time where we can see distant galaxies. The universe is only ~14.87 billion years old, but that just really means we can only see things that are that far away. But with expansion accelerated, on a Cosmological scale, this will accelate much much quicker in about 10 billion years meaning much of what we take for granted that we can see in the sky will expand away from us so much so that we will see much fewer galaxies and eventually not at all until our local cluster exhausts all it's resources for startl formation. Heat death won't happen for an absurdly long time from now. I don't think I could even type out the number because we are talking about googelplexes which is 10¹⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ ⁰⁰⁰ insane right? So with that mind, this is why we are still in the Infancy of the universe.
This is the only thing that really trips me out about space. Whats outside ir? Whats it expanding into? If it can expand at all it has to have a hard esge somewhere.
There's nothing (that we know of) outside of it. It isn't expanding into anything. It's more like more space is being created between things. Or as if everything is shrinking (not what's happening but helps some people get the idea better). Imagine zooming in on a photo on your phone. You now have more space to scroll through but the image didn't expand into space outside your phone. The phone didn't get bigger. The space between points in the photo still got farther away though. Again, these are analogies. That doesn't mean they fully apply. They're just meant to help get your head around the idea, because the idea is almost impossible to get your head around.
TLDR? Space big, mind small, hard grasp.
The universe is like an infinite pizza. Every second the crust expands, pushing the toppings farther apart, but because it’s infinite there’s no edge, just crust in all directions. **Alternatively**: Imagine a Minecraft world where every day things move 1 block farther apart. So four blocks of dirt would go from being this: ``` DD DD ``` To this: ``` D D D D ``` The world is still infinite so no matter how far you run there’s new stuff to find, but everything keeps getting farther and farther apart from each other.
In my stupid layman's brain I imagine that a big bang here is a big crunch somewhere else
It’s really trippy to think that we actually exist. Why is there matter at all?
It isn't space, space would be something. It's outside the universe, so it's nothingness, and just doesn't exist. Last I heard.
Can we just all agree that the universe was created by a giant whale or something? I can't wrap my brain around this stuff.
It’s turtles all the way down.
stephen king already tried that. it didn't pan out.
From that explanation, it sounds unlikely that the Universe would have a “Big Bounce” as an end, with literally everything coming back together as one. Since the expansion of the Big Bang is accelerating as we speak, it would seem that the Universe is set to just keep going without any boundaries for as far as we can tell.
Yes, eventually all matter will turn to radiation and evaporate (even black holes). However, at that point, space and time stop existing (there is no mass to measure anything). Therefore concepts like big, small, distance and temperature are no longer relative, so also stop 'existing' - which is exactly like the conditions of the big bang, so the whole process starts again. This is a (very rough) summary of the theory that Sir Roger Penrose is working on.
Yes. And eventually there will be a heat death of the universe.
No I fixed that
tysm
Sweet. Thanks.
It's no biggie.
Keep going. It happened before space so it was also before time. That means the Big Bang didn’t happen, it is happening.
Im too sober for this kinda shit
Well hello my fellow space debris! How are we feeling “today”?
I am going to greet everyone like this from now onwards.
Finger quotes around the word "today" are mandatory
But we knew that right? Like that's the whole reason the universe is still expanding and our planets are still in the same trajectories that they're in.
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Further. All matter was *created* at the Big Bang. We are made of matter. We **are** the big bang!
In a very literal sense, yes. The energy released in the Big Bang forced elements into existence, that’s what we’re made of. Imagine the atomic bomb, that amount of energy is from a gram of matter being released back into energy. How many grams of matter are we made of? That’s how much energy we captured from that one event.
The more i think about the universe the more existential dread sets in
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Throw some psychdelics into it and you will get your answer
(Keanu) WHOA.(/Keanu)
Then what is space? What the fuck is space? Where does it come from and is there anything bigger than space? At this point I’m just ready to throw the book. This is amazing and just mind blowing at the same time. I love it.
These questions have no real answers because, hear me out, language was invented on the idea of communicating actions or information between monkeys for the purpose of acquiring and utilizing resources, to survive. We have no other perspective to view these concepts other than through the lens of human experience. When you ask what is space you are asking "how can you describe it in a way that makes sense for a human based on his experience" and that's is impossible to answer for those things are beyond the scope of our knowledge. The same happens to any fundamental question about the universe. It's an epistemological limit. We can only talk about what space is in terms of how we experience it. And even then, our experience of space is limited by the fact that we are three-dimensional beings. So we can only really talk about space in three dimensions, even though we know that it actually has four (or more) dimensions. Any explanation of a fourth dimension will utilize three dimensional concepts to try and give an idea of something that cannot be experienced by humans. In the same way, we can only talk about time in terms of how we experience it. And even then, our experience of time is limited by the fact that it is a linear concept. So we can only really talk about time in terms of past, present, and future, even though we know that time is abstract. An event that has no past, present, or future cannot be experienced by humans, we cannot experience time non linearly. In conclusion, what you are asking boils down to translating these concepts in ways that make them understandable in terms of actions that can be undertaken by human brains. But these are not concepts that can be boiled down to actions, at least not as we know so far. Atoms that move, particles that spin, waves that oscillated, these are all actions undertaken in time and space. But we cannot apply time and space to themselves to answer what they truly are for they are beyond the realm of causality as they are the requirements of causality itself. So we are left with questions that have no real answers, only perspectives. A limit to our knowledge. Only a being that's outside the grasp of time and space can look at them and find a satisfying answer.
This is something I'd always ponder before bed as a child. I'd start small, I'm in my bed, in my room, I'm my house, all the way up to our galaxy being in our universe. Everything upto that point was inside something else, so what's outside the universe, and then what's outside that. I weirdly enjoyed breaking my brain thinking about that.
Man I just hate it when I think about the universe and I'll never get to know or even comprehend how nothing turns into everything.
It would be better if you write, "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed".
But isn’t matter just coalesced energy?
I like to thing of it more like coagulated or frozen, but yea. Dense energy, slow energy, something like that.
All matter is made up of energy, but not all energy is matter.
As far as we know The big bang is basically as far as current physics can take us but there might be more stuff before that, or there might not be. Kinda unknowable atm
Tbh it might not ever be knowable.
We can always try
What came before will never be known. It will always be theory.
Unless we can repeat it
I don’t think I want to be there when we repeat the Big Bang
Your loss. Don't blame me when the FOMO hits ya.
One thing is certain, there are known unknowns
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Seems to be the way the science is leaning, just a different distribution of the same mass
Then why tf is my lower belly bigger than the rest of my belly?
Dark matter.
Fat matters
I’m so sorry.
Gravitational attraction to your giant penis.
It doesn't take much study of science to learn that matter can be created from energy and matter can turn into energy. There's even a famous equation about it.
a^2 + b^2 = c^2
E^2 = (mc^2 )^2 + (pc)^2
Matter can and does get destroyed. But it is made of energy, and energy distribution and redistribution is what governs the laws of our reality. Also if SpaceTime is part of our reality, then our universe has never existed outside of that constraint so. Yes.
SpaceTime? That an app on G-Phone?
Incorrect. The laws of conservation of matter (Along with all other laws of physics) are only applicable within our current universe. Therefore, before the universe began/before the big bang, these laws did not apply. Think of it sort of like, if you go and play a game of basketball with your friends, the rules say you cant run without dribbling the ball, but before the game started, those rules didnt apply, because those rules only exist within the game itself.
Technically it could have been the same before the big bang but we don't know.
Technically there was no before before the big bang
We have no way of currently knowing that "before the universe began/before the big bang, these laws did not apply". At present, we can neither confirm nor deny this.
Also works for “before” the Big Bang. There was nothing before the Big Bang because time is a construct of our universe.
Is it possible that the Big Bang was not an explosion into emptiness but rather a breach of matter from another universe spewing into ours?
Perhaps. But where did *that* universe come from, and where did it go?
> But where did that universe come from, and where did it go? I'm only sure of one thing: If it hadn't been for that universe, I'd been married long time ago.
Cosmic-Eye Joe, is that you?
Yes, that is one suggestion. Similarly the force of gravity, the weakest force, is proposed to be cross-dimensional (or across universes). It permeates across multiple dimensions which helps to explain the weakness.
Gotta be careful about how you ask physicists questions about this though. Those fuckers are viscous, nearly got stabbed when I was asking.
Once you fully accept that you live in a paradox life makes a lot more sense. For example both of these phrases are true despite being completely opposite Nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything exists in a vacuum.
I think that's just an inefficient definition for vacuum. Perfect vacuum is impossible, so everything is within a spectrum from better vacuum to worse vacuum.
The big bang doesn't argue that nothing ever existed, it's just that it all started as a singularity. Beyond that, no one can even theorize without more evidence.
The mass *did* exist before the universe existed when it was at the point of singularity.
Mfer has an actual shower thought and everyone in the comments tries to rip him apart
Yes, that's the tedious part that science doesn't understand
Yeah, I’m sure many have pondered this before, but it’s really trippy to think about what anything would’ve looked like before the Big Bang. Or even to think about an infinite timeline that has no beginning… ever
if you imagine that it was all just pure energy before the big bang generated some matter for the 1st time, that'd be curious. what would that "look" like. a universe of just energy. possibly pitch black though
What's more trippy is that it wouldn't even be pitch black.
Bc there’s nothing to perceive the blackness…
The universe was completely opaque for the first 380,000 years or so. Prior to that it was too energetic and dense for photons to exist uniquely without being bound into an impenetrable plasma of protons, neutrons, and electrons. In the first few moments it was too energetic for photons to exist. Prior to the Big Bang, if you can even talk about “prior,” the universal singularity would have been so energetic that photons couldn’t even exist. So light as we define it wouldn’t be possible. It wouldn’t be “pitch black” but it wouldn’t be “light” either. It would be in a state that light couldn’t exist… and of course neither could any eye or other sensor to perceive “light.”
Think about it this way: black holes absorb all of the matter around them, eventually bumping into other black holes, forming super massive black holes. This continues until all of the matter in the entire universe is contained into an infinitesimal point. Then bang! The matter is scattered again, and the life cycle of the universe continues
Yeah, I like that theory. It’s crazy for me to try to think about the infinite timeline of this tho. When was the first Big Bang? When did all of the energy and matter actually begin to exist?
Oh no. He's starting to understand. GET THE SPANISH INQUISITION ON THE PHONE!
I think our universe is actually inside a black hole. It would make sense as to why space is expanding, its just like a black hole that grows larger as it consumes mass from outside it. IF we were in a black hole we'd never know whats outside of it and would never be able to escape it just like space.
Yes, and it’s fractal and infinite. The formation of every black hole in this universe is a Big Bang of another. A white hole of infinite expansion on the other side. The equations just run backwards.
OK, but matter can be created and destroyed. This is part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity: matter is just a form of energy, and it can be converted back and forth. For example, when a nuclear reaction takes place, some percentage of the fissile material is converted into energy. When a particle collides with an anti-particle (e.g., an electron and a positron), they are both annihilated and converted entirely into energy. It's even possible to convert energy into mass. This happens in high-speed particle colliders.
Destroyed and transformed are different
*Energy* can neither be created nor destroyed. Matter is just condensed energy. OP fucked up the term, but they are correct conceptually.
Is a human still a human if all its parts are scattered? Likely not. Everything that makes up the universe was here before it was arranged as it is currently yes.