

No evidence of time before Big Bang - japaget
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101210/full/news.2010.665.html

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gasull
Isn't time, somehow, a human abstraction?

I mean, what really exists is movement. Earth spins over itself and we call it
a day, Earth circles the Sun and we call it a year, a few quartz electronic
pulses are called a second, etc. We use these events to measure time.

Before Big Bang there was no movement, therefore, there was nothing to measure
time with. If there's nothing to measure time with, there's no time.

~~~
brc
True but if I travel away from a clock at light speed, time doesn't move
anymore but I'm still moving.

Personally I like the idea that the big bang is a cyclical event - the
universe expands until some point, then it collapses again. At some
indeterminate point it expands again. Whether or not Earth gets recreated is
for someone else to ponder.

~~~
thret
Nietzsche did, the concept of Eternal Recurrence is the basis of his
philosophy.

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swah
So what is the consensus about what time is? Is the following a valid
understanding of the post title: "No evidence of stuff going on before stuff
existed" ?

~~~
jerf
The "consensus" is that time started at the Big Bang and there is no
meaningful referent for "before the Big Bang". However, the consensus is also
that the theory that says this is flawed in several known ways, not least of
which is the lack of unification between quantum and relativistic gravity that
you may have heard about. This is the consensus theory not because it is
perfect, but because nobody has yet managed to put together an alternative
that does better across the board. Really the upshot is that nobody really
knows, even for small values of "know".

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danbmil99
Penrose would be a safer bet if he hadn't written "The Emperor's New Mind".
Having completely flamed out on a subject I consider myself competent enough
to judge him on, I'm much less willing to bet he's right in an area where I am
less confident and knowledgeable.

~~~
absconditus
I have never read "The Emperor's New Mind". What are its flaws?

~~~
jackfoxy
It's been a while, but if I recall Penrose basically attacks the notion of
"stong AI". Others, e.g. Scott Aaronson, have ripped his argument to shreds.
But not to dismiss Penrose's argument too quickly, Aaronson did devote an
entire university course to presenting the counter argument
<http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/>. I think there is a case to be made
against strong AI along the lines of "just because a posteriori you can model
anything digitially does not make it so", but apparently Penrose failed. (And
don't get me wrong, I'm not the guy to make the case either.)

~~~
russellallen
I'm always suspicious of phrases such as "ripped his arguments to shreds"
especially in such a young and contested field as AI and doubly when dealing
with the difficult issues of sentience and Strong AI...

I'm not accusing you of anything, but as a general comment, without
necessarily supporting them, the response to his arguments on this issue often
seem to involve overly emotive language.

~~~
jackfoxy
Normally I regret using inflammatory language, but in this case I think it
invokes the fervor I have seen in most every defense of strong AI I have ever
read. Personally I am _not_ a proponent of strong AI. Proponents have,
however, built a strong case that tends to put opponents in the position of
having to prove a negative.

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iwwr
Given a large enough sample of random noise, you can find any finite pattern
in it, akin to the infinite monkey theorem. The human mind is biased toward
patterns.

~~~
jsmcgd
True, but if the first humans on Mars were to find the complete works of
Shakespeare buried under the Martian soil, it probably wouldn't be prudent to
dismiss it as a cosmological fluke.

~~~
iwwr
True, but try sampling the CMB for long enough and you would find a few lines
of Shakespeare in some encoding somewhere.

~~~
hugh3
Honestly, we have the statistical techniques needed to figure out whether a
given pattern in the CMB is real or not. I'm no statistician, but folks that
are can do this kind of thing for breakfast.

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PostOnce
The summary says they are just disputing that concentric rings of uniform
temperature in the cosmic background radiation are caused by oscillations of
the universe, that is, multiple big bangs.

That's not to say that there aren't oscillations, just that these aren't a
reflection of them. At least that's what I got from skimming, didn't bother to
read the whole thing.

It'd be a little arrogant to say with certainty what happened before the big
bang. I think the headline is misleading, very misleading.

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brudgers
> _"Penrose, however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead
> originates from before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon
> that saw the Universe expand to become infinitely large and very smooth.
> That aeon in turn was born in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a
> still earlier aeon, and so on, creating a potentially infinite cycle with no
> beginning and no end._

 _...Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies..."_

Did that idea (turtles all the way down) really require a scientific
challenge?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down>

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younata
I thought the Big Bang theory ONLY dealt with what happened right AFTER the
universe was created.

I always thought that cosmologists have been trying to correct the popular
notion that the Big Bang also describes what happened before the universe was
created.

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itistoday
The jury is still out.

 _Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing
that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model
and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such
as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a
response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv5. However, he is
not prepared to state that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model.
"We have found some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model,"
he says._

My money's on Penrose.

~~~
andrewcooke
I only read the BC paper (Moss et al, [3]), because I knew one of the authors
(and he's a smart guy). Anyway, they show that you can find triangles just as
easily, and that you can find similar circles in computer-generated random
data with the same properties as the background.

At the same time, Penrose likes to be controversial.

So I guess I'm saying that I'm willing to take your money...

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rhizome
Also: no evidence of Pop Tarts either.

