Since "before" and "after" have to do with time, and time did not exist until after the universe was spat out by the alleged "big bang" ..... then how can anyone talk about what went on or existed "before" the big bang?

Hmmmm. You misread the article. If they are saying the universe is flat, they are saying that they CAN'T see the limits in size because it is too big... maybe infinite. But since the light from the big bang is still around, WMAP can see it rather well.

If the big bang happened (which I do not believe for a moment), it itself is a sort of "event," right?

Let's look at conditions. If we can imagine a condition of no big bang having happened, and then a condition where the big bang occurs, or has already occurred, then, from the limited human sensory perspective, a. precedes b. (insofar as we are able to comprehend the term "precedes").

If time is based on the relative motion of objects, particles, etc., then it stands to reason that there would be no "time," per se, prior to the event, assuming that said event brought all these particles and such into existence. There's no actual frame of reference.

But there could still be a condition of pre-bang (for lack of a better term), only understandable as a hypothetical conjecture (because we have no real way of determining what, if anything, was there "before") -- in terms of establishing a "time-frame."

In other words, if the bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, is it pointless to talk about things from 100 billion years ago? Eric J. Lerner points out that some of the galactic clusters we see today would have taken 100 billion years to form -- one reason he wrote a book called "The Big Bang Never Happened." He advocates Hannes Alfven's plasma cosmology, which has other problems (but eliminates the need for patches such as dark matter and dark energy).

Assuming that one can establish a time-point for the bang to have occurred, I see nothing outrageous in speculating about "time" -- forwards and backwards -- from that marker. In the cyclical model, something very definitely happened before the bang -- I'm not saying it's right, or that we'll ever actually know, but there are a lot of possibilities out there.

If the big bang happened (which I do not believe for a moment), it itself is a sort of "event," right?

Let's look at conditions. If we can imagine a condition of no big bang having happened, and then a condition where the big bang occurs, or has already occurred, then, from the limited human sensory perspective, a. precedes b. (insofar as we are able to comprehend the term "precedes").

If time is based on the relative motion of objects, particles, etc., then it stands to reason that there would be no "time," per se, prior to the event, assuming that said event brought all these particles and such into existence. There's no actual frame of reference.

But there could still be a condition of pre-bang (for lack of a better term), only understandable as a hypothetical conjecture (because we have no real way of determining what, if anything, was there "before") -- in terms of establishing a "time-frame."

In other words, if the bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, is it pointless to talk about things from 100 billion years ago? Eric J. Lerner points out that some of the galactic clusters we see today would have taken 100 billion years to form -- one reason he wrote a book called "The Big Bang Never Happened." He advocates Hannes Alfven's plasma cosmology, which has other problems (but eliminates the need for patches such as dark matter and dark energy).

Assuming that one can establish a time-point for the bang to have occurred, I see nothing outrageous in speculating about "time" -- forwards and backwards -- from that marker. In the cyclical model, something very definitely happened before the bang -- I'm not saying it's right, or that we'll ever actually know, but there are a lot of possibilities out there.

I read the 1993 paper you referenced. It has many questions which have since been answered by the WMAP and other date. What were once highly speculative theories about events involved in the big bang, early universal expansion, and the "plasma universe" have since been eliminated by direct observation. Having a theory that "does not need dark energy or dark matter" goes up in smoke when the dark areas and mapped in fine detail and the quantities of dark matter mass are observed and calculated to a high degree of accuracy.

Questions about old star formations that appear to be older than the age of our universe are answered when detailed verification of properties of early expansion are found to meet mathematical models.

There are certainly many questions about what happened before the big bang, but the events between now and when it happened are being answered with great accuracy.

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/ and my WMAP post

just a quick question... how does anyone know it "is with great accuracy?"

I read the 1993 paper you referenced. It has many questions which have since been answered by the WMAP and other date. What were once highly speculative theories about events involved in the big bang, early universal expansion, and the "plasma universe" have since been eliminated by direct observation. Having a theory that "does not need dark energy or dark matter" goes up in smoke when the dark areas and mapped in fine detail and the quantities of dark matter mass are observed and calculated to a high degree of accuracy.

Questions about old star formations that appear to be older than the age of our universe are answered when detailed verification of properties of early expansion are found to meet mathematical models.

There are certainly many questions about what happened before the big bang, but the events between now and when it happened are being answered with great accuracy.

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/ and my WMAP post

I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what the real truth is. I just refuse to automatically accept the standard model simply because it preserves a preferred status quo. That's not science.

I think those adjectives most often come into play when young earth creationism is being treated as a serious idea.

If by 'creation' you mean any act of deliberate 'making', yes. I said elsewhere that its odd to me how strongly opposed some theists are to the big bang, as the big bang is much more favorable (relatively speaking) to some kind of creationism than other theories.

Please excuse this illiterate Christian, but being illiterate, I don't know the meaning of some words... What does "open-minded" mean?

I think the squirrel that lives in the tree behind my house is responsible for all of our global financial problems. He's actually one of many transdimensional squirrels, with thousands of projections into our time space continuum, all of which take the form of squirrels. These hyper-squirrels practice mind control, and they use human beings as pieces in an elaborate game, like chess. Our global economis issues are just side effects of that game. I know this because I can see it in his eyes when he stares at me.


If you don't accept my idea as worthy of exploration... Well you are so closed minded!!

I think a sensible and sane person, having just seen their mongoose mountain bike that morning, and being told that its missing because a 20lb house cat "ate it", should reasonably conclude that the person is being flippant. It doesn't matter that it might be possible to grind up the bike, mix it with her food, and force all of it to her (without killing her in the process) in 6 hours. The point is that its not 'closed minded' to discount this idea, when presented as the first explanation for why your bike is absent. Consider at least three levels - the person who would never, ever, under any circumstance, accept that this might be true. The person who immediately insist that it must be true, in the absence of any supporting evidence save the bicycle's absence. And then the people who don't waste their time with either of those positions, but reasonable discount the idea as likely being nonsense and seeking a more reasonable explanation.

Define your symbols. Its dishonest to use different bases without saying so.

"is" or "contains"? In my view, at least when speaking intentionally, 'is' should denote complete equality and identity, unless you are saying 'is a' to indicate membership in a set.
White is not identical to green.

Fine, but crying 'closemindedness' just because sane, informed people won't accept my own idiotic ideas is an abuse of the term.

Says you. I disagree. It seems to me that once prokaryotes existed, the odds of sentient lifeforms eventually existing is not that unlikely.

I think those words come into play when one is unsure of their stance...

If by 'creation' you mean any act of deliberate 'making', yes. I said elsewhere that its odd to me how strongly opposed some theists are to the big bang, as the big bang is much more favorable (relatively speaking) to some kind of creationism than other theories.

I one does not know the cause of the "big-bang", how can one dismiss intentional design?

Being willing to consider new arguments and new evidence, and being willing to change one's mind if those new arguments and evidence warrant doing so.

It does not mean 'being open to other ideas, for the sake of being open to them. Especially when you've already examined those ideas and found them wanting.

No comment except for the possibilty that your mind is controlled by squirrels is there...

You forgot about the person who sees that it can be either true and false.

So, do you think that there's no "sane" or "rational" scenario in which a cat can eat a bike?

Do you know what the odds are that even prokaryotes existed? I'm not talking about evolution from single-cell organisms...

I believe there are too many scientists, who have invested too much time and energy promoting and believing big bang, who are in a position where they feel their careers will be seriously damaged should big bang turn out to be wrong. Hence the series of patches which have been applied.

No one, to my knowledge, has satisfactorily addressed observations by Halton Arp and others re: galaxies with attached quasars which show radically different red-shifting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTfRy0LTD0&feature=related

I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what the real truth is. I just refuse to automatically accept the standard model simply because it preserves a preferred status quo. That's not science.

There are many circumstances where those terms come into play. Young earth creationism - the positive, definite belief that the earth is less than 10k years old - is, quite simply, stupid.

Which is not to say that only stupid people hold this belief.

Who says that the big-bang (if true), was not the act of creation?

ID is an ambiguous term.

A cat eating a was not the topic. The suggestion was a specific cat eating a specific bike in a specified time frame. The point of that example was to bring the topic of 'sane assessment of probable explanations' out of the complex domain creation and evolution, and into everyday life.

In everyday life, we can all see that it is terribly unlikely that the speaker is speaking literal truth, and sensibly set that explanation aside.

Exactly. You cannot prove that your mind is not controlled by squirrels - and yet it is sensible for you to discount this possibility.

There are actually many, many more approaches. My first listing had 6 entries, and I cut it down to keep the conversation from going to far afield.

One very common and annoying logical fallacy people commit is saying 'it must be either a, b, or c' for no better reason then their failure to imagine more options.

You might think that I fail to imagine a means by which that cat ate that bike in that time period - I don't. I simply assert that its too unlikely to take seriously.

There you go again with 'a' cat and 'a' bike. I am speaking of 'the' cat and 'the' bike.

Scenarios are not rational or irrational - it is our assessments of the probabilities of those scenarios which are (or not).

I agree that its incredible.

But going back in the convo...when a tornado strikes a lumberyard, the natural tendency of every action, every collision, is to create more disorder.

When you have any kind of self-replication chemical machinery - at all - something new and different has entered the equation. There is a tendency towards disorder, and a 2nd law compliant tendency towards more order.

Its really amazing.

Comparing evolution (if that is the comparison being made) of life to this kind of chaos found when a tornado strikes a lumberyard is misleading.

The ekpyrotic theory hypothesizes that the origin of the observable universe occurred when two parallel branes collided.

(String Theory)

So, at what point do you not think Young Earth Creationism is stupid? 15k years? 50k years? When they agree with what you believe?

Who says that the big-bang (if true), was not the act of creation?

Sorry, I thought you were opposed to any type of creationism.

It's only ambiguous if you need to know the source, otherwise it's spot on.

The likelyhood of that statement is another matter. If however, you wish to bring probability into your assesment of sanity, then you may as well call everyone who believes in any theory about the origins of life crazy too.

This is what Steinhardt and Turok's book is about. They also refer to is as the Cyclic theory.

From http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cosmology-02c.html

Adding Trillions Of Years To The Life Of The Universe

A new theory of the universe suggests that space and time may not have begun in a big bang, but may have always existed in an endless cycle of expansion and rebirth.

Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of Cambridge University described their proposed theory in an article published April 25 in an online edition of Science.

The theory proposes that, in each cycle, the universe refills with hot, dense matter and radiation, which begins a period of expansion and cooling like the one of the standard big bang picture.

After 14 billion years, the expansion of the universe accelerates, as astronomers have recently observed. After trillions of years, the matter and radiation are almost completely dissipated and the expansion stalls. An energy field that pervades the universe then creates new matter and radiation, which restarts the cycle.

.........

This is what Steinhardt and Turok's book is about. They also refer to is as the Cyclic theory.

From http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cosmology-02c.html

Adding Trillions Of Years To The Life Of The Universe

A new theory of the universe suggests that space and time may not have begun in a big bang, but may have always existed in an endless cycle of expansion and rebirth.

Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of Cambridge University described their proposed theory in an article published April 25 in an online edition of Science.

The theory proposes that, in each cycle, the universe refills with hot, dense matter and radiation, which begins a period of expansion and cooling like the one of the standard big bang picture.

After 14 billion years, the expansion of the universe accelerates, as astronomers have recently observed. After trillions of years, the matter and radiation are almost completely dissipated and the expansion stalls. An energy field that pervades the universe then creates new matter and radiation, which restarts the cycle.

The new theory provides possible answers to several longstanding problems with the big bang model, which has dominated the field of cosmology for decades. It addresses, for example, the nagging question of what might have triggered or come "before" the beginning of time.

The idea also reproduces all the successful explanations provided by standard picture, but there is no direct evidence to say which is correct, said Steinhardt, a professor of physics.

"I do not eliminate either of them at this stage," he said. "To me, what's interesting is that we now have a second possibility that is poles apart from the standard picture in many respects, and we may have the capability to distinguish them experimentally during the coming years."

The big bang model of the universe, originally suggested over 60 years ago, has been developed to explain a wide range of observations about the cosmos. A major element of the current model, added in the 1980s, is the theory of "inflation," a period of hyperfast expansion that occurred within the first second after the big bang.

This inflationary period is critical for explaining the tremendous "smoothness" and homogeneity of the universe observed by astronomers, as well as for explaining tiny ripples in space that led to the formation galaxies.

Scientists also have been forced to augment the standard theory with a component called "dark energy" to account for the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The new model replaces inflation and dark energy with a single energy field that oscillates in such a way as to sometimes cause expansion and sometimes cause stagnation. At the same time, it continues to explain all the currently observed phenomena of the cosmos in the same detail as the big bang theory.

Because the new theory requires fewer components, and builds them in from the start, it is more "economical," said Steinhardt, who was one of the leaders in establishing the theory of inflation.

Another advantage of the new theory is that it automatically includes a prediction of the future course of the universe, because it goes through definite repeating cycles lasting perhaps trillions of years each.

The big bang/inflation model has no built-in prediction about the long-term future; in the same way that inflation and dark energy arose unpredictably, another effect could emerge that would alter the current course of expansion.

The cyclic model entails many new concepts that Turok and Steinhardt developed over the last few years with Justin Khoury, a graduate student at Princeton, Burt Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania and Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study.

"This work by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok is extraordinarily exciting and represents the first new big idea in cosmology in over two decades," said Jeremiah Ostriker, professor of astrophysics at Princeton and the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge.

"They have found a simple explanation for the observed fact the universe on large scales looks the same to us left and right, up and down -- a seemingly obvious and natural condition -- that in fact has defied explanation for decades."

Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge, noted that the physics concerning key properties of the expanding universe remain "conjectural, and still not rooted in experiment or observation."

"There have been many ideas over the last 20 years," said Rees.

"Steinhardt and Turok have injected an imaginative new speculation.

Their work emphasizes the extent to which we may need to jettison common sense concepts, and transcend normal ideas of space and time, in order to make real progress.

"This work adds to the growing body of speculative research which intimates that physical reality could encompass far more than just the aftermath of 'our' big bang."

The cyclic universe theory represents a combination of standard physical concepts and ideas from the emerging fields of string theory and M-theory, which are ambitious efforts to develop a unified theory of all physical forces and particles. Although these theories are rooted in complex mathematics, they offer a compelling graphic picture of the cyclic universe theory.

Under these theories, the universe would exist as two infinitely large parallel sheets, like two sheets of paper separated by a microscopic distance. This distance is a extra, or fifth dimension, that is not apparent us.

At our current phase in the history of the universe, the sheets are expanding in all directions, gradually spreading out and dispersing all the matter and energy they contain. After trillions of years, when they become essentially empty, they enter a "stagnant" period in which they stop stretching and, instead, begin to move toward each other as the fifth dimension undergoes a collapse.

The sheets meet and "bounce" off each other. The impact causes the sheets to be charged with the extraordinarily hot and dense matter that is commonly associated with the big bang. After the sheets move apart, they resume their expansion, spreading out the matter, which cools and coalesces into stars and galaxies as in our present universe.

The sheets, or branes, as physicists call them, are not parallel universes, but rather are facets of the same universe, with one containing all the ordinary matter we know and the other containing "we know not what," said Steinhardt.

It is conceivable, he said, that a material called dark matter, which is widely believed to make up a significant part of the universe, resides on this other brane. The two sheets interact only by gravity, with massive objects in one sheet exerting a tug on matter in the other, which is what dark matter does to ordinary matter.

The movements and properties of these sheets all arise naturally from the underlying mathematics of the model, noted Steinhardt. That is in contrast to the big bang model, in which dark energy has been added simply to explain current observations.

Steinhardt and Turok continue to refine the theory and are looking for theoretical or experimental ideas that might favor one idea over the other.

"These paradigms are as far apart as you can imagine in terms of the nature of time," said Steinhardt. "On the other hand, in terms of what they predict about the universe, they are as close as you can be up to what you can measure so far.

"Yet, we also know that, with more precise observations that may be possible in the next decade or so, you can distinguish them. That is the fascinating situation we find ourselves in. It's fun to debate which ones you like better, but I really think nature will be the final arbiter here."