I already posted some of this, but I think some of you might have the patience to check out this video if you haven't. It's a lecture by Lawrence Krauss entitled: 'A Universe From Nothing'
I have the ebook and am finishing it now. He's a great orator and writer, as well as a damn fine Physicist/Cosmologist.
http://youtu.be/7ImvlS8PLIo?t=2m7sSummary:
(Note, I am an experimental/applied physicist, so I could have the following wrong. We already had a heated discussion on the "nothing" Krauss uses, elsewhere.)
What was before the Big Bang?
What made the Big Bang, universe and us?
By measuring the background microwave radiation from the big bang, cosmologists can go back in time to the point at which the universe was so hot, the radiation can no longer be measured. This is like a wall, blocking off "visibility" of the universe's space-time center. They can look for the wall all around the universe in each direction and determine the distances from us to build a map of the geometry of the universe. This geometry gives us the curvature of the entire universe.
That curvature tells us a very important result: that the universe is flat. A flat universe started, at the big bang, with a net energy of zero.
Zero total energy means the universe probably, very likely, started from nothing (complete emptiness), except the random virtual events of quantum/particle/energy fluctuations (still at net zero energy) around the zero point. In other words, a universe didn't need a creator. And before the big bang, there was nothing. That nothing is exactly what is needed to start the big bang. We came from nothing.
Nothing is the essential ingredient to everything.
That, and one other thing (not really discussed much by Lawrence Krauss), probablility. Nothing mixed with probability will always give something.
Now for my own thoughts:
The next question is, if everything we see and measure is from nothing, and probability is needed for something, where did probability come from?
You can't measure probability like radiation, mass, etc. And yet, probability is essentially omnipotent and omnipresent. It influences every event down to the most fundamental level (quantum). You can't stop it. You can't block it. You can't alter it. You can't catch it and hold it in your hand or your detector or your container. Probability isn't really something. It isn't exactly nothing, though. Probability is the guiding principle of everything in the universe, living or nonliving, near or far, big or small, now or anytime.
Before the big bang, there was probability. And nothing. . . .
In his book and in other interviews, however, Krauss tells us that you don't even have space-time or the current set of laws. So waiting is not really defined at that point. If I understand Krauss, Relativistic QM field theory is a result of the something from nothing big bang. And the only thing one needs then (not from Krauss) is probability. If you convolve (push together) two purely random (and infinite or finite) sets of possibilities (net-zero energy with possibility completely mixed randomly=nothing, not structure, not extant), that convolving of negative random possibilities and positive random possibilities will result in a convolution of probability in the same form we call today the Normal Distribution of probability theory. The possibility sets are like virtual "things" (fields, particles, etc) that don't exist but have the possibility to exist.
Now, I am not saying that math had to exist. Probability theory is our mathematical description of what happens in nature. Our observations of randomness can be explained by that theory. But the events and observations are not dependent on the math or the laws of physics (which are the models we use to describe them). And it is these kind of virtual events that can actually produce something when mixed. Like Krauss said, the net energy remains zero. But the rules of interaction between the negative and positive possibility sets did exist. That's the interesting part. (of course, I am outside of my expertise here, so I could be way off.)
Net zero energy producing something of apparent structure from probabilistic rules could appear strangely....like a virtual reality (net zero energy) predicated on rules (programming). Wala! it's the matrix.
Haha
Actually, I don't know. but it is strange.
Another interesting bit to come out in recent years:
Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene thinks we might be holograms.
" 3-D objects, even the ones that we’re familiar with — you and me and everything around us — these 3-D objects may indeed be describable by information on a 2-D surface that surrounds us, a surface that in some sense is at the edge of the universe. Now, this starts to sound like a hologram; a hologram is a thin 2-D piece of plastic which, when illuminated correctly, yields a realistic three-dimensional image. The idea is we may be that three-dimensional image of this more fundamental information on the 2-D surface that surrounds us.
"Now, let me just point out, this is a hard idea even for physicists who work on it every day to fully grasp. We’re still trying to really dot the i’s and cross the t’s and understand in detail what this would mean. But there are many who now take this idea very seriously, that we maybe a kind of holographic projection. "
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/geeks-guide-brian-greene/If that were true, then the "afterlife" may be inside a blackhole (if I understood what wired was reporting on what Greene was saying, but I admit, I still don't quite get it, and I studied physics in grad school)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2012 08:08PM by Jesus Smith.