Time frozen before Big Bang

Post Reply New Topic

But time was nonexistent prior to the Big Bang Theory... what were Sheldon and Leonard going?

Bazinga

sorry, not up to reading through 4 pages, so this point may have been made already:

time is a measurement of change - if there was a period of no change in the universe, there would be no passage of time during that period. if the universe consisted of a singularity (ie. pre-big bang) there could be no change, so no time. not "frozen time", the concept of time would be completely irrelevant in such a situation.

personally, i've never bought into the big bang theory. it is illogical and based on the (IMO) incorrect assumption that the hubble red-shift is a doppler effect, conceived of by those who can't get their minds around the concept of infinity, and maintained only through constant mathematical fudging as each new experiment fails to support the hypothesis. plasma cosmology just makes so much more sense.

What is plasma cosmology?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

Interesting read. Looks like a dead theory now; with more and more recent observational evidence supporting the big bang and less supporting plasma cosmology.

Thanks. From what I gleaned from the Wiki article, plasma cosmology is a minority opinion.

The Big Bang hypothesis is still the predominant cosmological model.

http://physics.about.com/od/timetravel/ ... eexist.htm

You made me think of several times I heard the "time is an illusion" nonsense which doesn't have anything to do with science, but rather philosophical junk and pseudoscience.

Treating time as an existent in itself is a classic example of the reification fallacy. It is, however, derived from the relative motions between existents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

Does Minkowski spacetime conflicts with your notion of time, is it an example of a reitifcation fallacy for you or it isn't? Just asking to see in which position you actually are, which I'm not quite certain, do actual physics support your idea?

No, and, in general, not unless you are using quantitative descriptions as conceptual explanations. Many physical phenomenons cannot be explained, yet, but they can be described mathematically. Gravity is one example. We can measure it, but we don't know what it is on a conceptual level. The same goes for discrepancies like time dilation. We can measure it, but we don't know what it is. Trying to explain it by reifying known abstract concepts could lead to very odd notions.

Time before the Big Bang needn?t be ?frozen? any more than geographical latitude is ?frozen? north of the North Pole.

I've had the chance to give the paper a thorough read now.

Cosmology is a thing I would love to be better at, but as a layman that will always be the case. A lot of what I read, left me wishing to understand more about the many aspects of the topic, but I still feel confident that I can offer some opinions on the paper.

The biggest difficulty is in the fact that it's 30 years old, and lacks a lot of the more up-to-date theories, information, maths, experiments and so on. Much has changed, even in the last 10 years, let alone the last 30. The Hubble telescope has been of immense help in connecting theories with evidence. Hubble has taken photos of black holes and other telemetry has added to the evidence (unlike Alfven's skepticism in their existence). The Higgs boson has been found, even if provisionally. (Of course, in the general media, you'll get the first evidence as news, but nothing of any of the follow-up.) The Higgs boson team were not irresponsible in their reporting of it - they themselves said that more experiments would need to be conducted.

But even apart from the 30 year gap, Alfven's document is incomplete. On the 10th page, he makes a lot of claims about the lala land that mathematicians and cosmologists live in, without quoting any source or giving any objective evidence.

On page 13, he talks about the size of the universe yet does not distinguish between the whole universe or the Hubble sphere. I spent considerable time at physicsforums.com and saw many chastised for forgetting to make the distinction. I don't know what science believed about the size and shape of the universe 30 years ago - I can only go on recent years. But it looks like Alfven suggests science believed (back then) that the universe was finite. If that was the case, then there's not enough information in his document that to give any idea where they thought the boundaries were, making his 10^10 and 10^29 quotes difficult to place without knowing the rest. Was he talking about the Hubble sphere or the whole universe... it sounds like the whole universe.

On page 17, he says that "It goes without saying" that hydromagnetics and plasma effects are more important. Without giving why this is so, I cannot be sure it's not just his opinion. It may be so, and if I was an educated cosmologist, I might agree, but he doesn't say who agrees with this statement and asks the reader to take it as gospel.

Also on page 17, he uses the rhetoric, "big bang believers claim." Again, I don't know what science 'claimed' 30 years ago, but in regard to the whole statement, I haven't seen it expressed as a claim, but as an assumption, for the sake of further investigation. Science does need to make assumptions, even if just to give them something to base tests on.

The rhetoric in much of the document is often like this, dismissive of mathematicians and cosmologists. And it's at its worst when on page 19, he compares mathematician with ancient prophets, as if their methods are somehow equal.

I found the document useful, because it gave me new information, new ideas, topics and aspects of cosmology to fascinate my enquiring mind, but with its age and diminished relevance, and it's dismissive rhetoric, I cannot read the substance without thinking it is coloured.

The claims made against mathematicians and cosmologists remind me of the climate change deniers. I once saw a documentary that showed how badly wrong the climate scientists had gotten it. It was a well known doco back in about 2002. The evidence and rhetoric was similar, and more convincing than Alfven's evidence and rhetoric. It took me a few years to return from being a climate skeptic, and in recent years their case has been made even stronger than ever (regarding both climate change and man's contribution).

Thanks for sharing the link. Nothing is ever in vein. I've taken things from it which I'll enjoy looking into.

You may wish to visit physicsforums.com and share it there. If you do so, let me know. I haven't been there for a couple of years and would enjoy seeing their take on it. On physicsforums, they have professionals from every discipline, as well as some very well informed laymen.

Thanks for the review. I can truly appreciate your objection to the form of Alfven's critique of platonic cosmology.

The East and West Pole have not yet been discovered. I suggest sending two expeditions in opposite directions along the equator in search of the missing poles.

They're probably located on "Uranus" because its axis of rotation is tilted sideways. Its north and south poles lie where most other planets have their equators.