Man vs Machine,The Hype: machine is beginning to win
-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com
You obviously didn't read that link properly:Science: But hey there is the big bang, before the big bang, there was absolutely nothing, no space, no time,**(see qoute below) no forces, everything just came flying out of nothing.
Asking what happened before the big bang is equivalent to asking what's further south of the south pole... which was a scary question when we didn't understand the geometry of the earth. It turns out that the world's a sphere, so if you keep going south, eventually you'll pass in an arc over the south pole and find yourself heading north. Likewise, if you draw the universe as a hypersphere or hypercone (because space and time are actually the same thing - spacetime), then if you keep going backwards in time (south), you'll pass in an arc over the big-bang (south pole) and find yourself going forwards in time (north).The problem of what happens at the beginning of time is a bit like the question of what happened at the edge of the world, when people thought the world was flat. Is the world a flat plate with the sea pouring over the edge? I have tested this experimentally. I have been round the world, and I have not fallen off. As we all know, the problem of what happens at the edge of the world was solved when people realized that the world was not a flat plate, but a curved surface. Time however, seemed to be different. It appeared to be separate from space, and to be like a model railway track. If it had a beginning, there would have to be someone to set the trains going. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity unified time and space as spacetime, but time was still different from space and was like a corridor, which either had a beginning and end, or went on forever. However, when one combines General Relativity with Quantum Theory, Jim Hartle and I realized that time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions. This means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning, in a similar way in which we got rid of the edge of the world. Suppose the beginning of the universe was like the South Pole of the earth, with degrees of latitude playing the role of time. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole.
It's a nonsense question based on false assumptions about the geometry of the universe. The solution to the question is to realise that the question is nonsense, to un-ask it, and replace it with a better question.
There quite possibly is stuff outside of the universe -- you posted links earlier to people investigating the hypothesis that our universe may be just one bubble in a sea of bubbles, and other universes might be able to bump into us. That stuff is very hard to test, but people are trying, because science is necessarily open to any idea that is plausible and not yet disproved.
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