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Big Bang expanded into nothingness?

dybmh

דניאל יוסף בן מאיר הירש
In another thread, the big bang expansion was breifly mentioned. A question was asked, rough paraphrase, "Didn't the big bang expand into infinite space?" The answer given was, also rough paraphrase, "No, space itself expanded." I did a tiny bit of reading on this, and I think I understand the idea. My question is, "If space itself expanded, then is the domain of the expansion infinite nothingness?"
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
A whole bunch of crazy ideas on the subject. *grin*

I guess it depends if the universe is a closed or open system givin the law of thermodynamics.

I think its why we have a multiverse theory of infinite universes.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
In another thread, the big bang expansion was breifly mentioned. A question was asked, rough paraphrase, "Didn't the big bang expand into infinite space?" The answer given was, also rough paraphrase, "No, space itself expanded." I did a tiny bit of reading on this, and I think I understand the idea. My question is, "If space itself expanded, then is the domain of the expansion infinite nothingness?"

Okay, this is more of a philosophy answer than pure science.
Start with the following 3 axiomatic assumptions:
The universe is real.
The universe has some form of regularity.
The universe is knowable.

Then concentrate on knowable. In practice it requires that something is experienced by somebody. Then go even closer. Something is also an experience of a property of some kind, e.g. the cat is black.
Now notice the following about nothing. It is a compound word made up of no and thing. Further you can't describe a property of nothing. Rather nothing is an abstract idea produced in the brain/mind and it has no properties.
So one answer to it, is that nothing doesn't even not exist. Rather it is unknowable other than the idea of it.

Hope it makes sense, :D
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
In another thread, the big bang expansion was breifly mentioned. A question was asked, rough paraphrase, "Didn't the big bang expand into infinite space?" The answer given was, also rough paraphrase, "No, space itself expanded." I did a tiny bit of reading on this, and I think I understand the idea. My question is, "If space itself expanded, then is the domain of the expansion infinite nothingness?"

I would wonder what's the difference between "space" and "nothing."
 

Pete in Panama

Active Member
I would wonder what's the difference between "space" and "nothing."
you're living in the world around you that has 3 dimensions that are all even. You seem to be unable to accept the fact that space can be curved --you wonder what it's curved IN. Whether you understand it or not, space itself can stop. There's nothing after it because there is no "there" there.

Perhaps what's missing is the humility to accept reality on its own terms and not try and make it something it isn't.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
you're living in the world around you that has 3 dimensions that are all even. You seem to be unable to accept the fact that space can be curved --you wonder what it's curved IN. Whether you understand it or not, space itself can stop. There's nothing after it because there is no "there" there.

Perhaps what's missing is the humility to accept reality on its own terms and not try and make it something it isn't.

I was just asking what the difference between "space" and "nothing" is. I don't see how such a question can lead to the conclusion that it lacks humility.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
I would wonder what's the difference between "space" and "nothing."
Reality is sometimes weirder than fiction. Space itself expands. The idea of it expanding into something may be nonsensical. Worse yet, the universe could have already have been infinitely large at the time of the Big Bang. We really do not know how compact it was at the time of the Big Bang. As we move backwards in time getting closer and closer to the time of the Big Bang all of our physics breakdown. We not only don't know, with our current state of knowledge we cannot know for sure what happened. When the Big Bang occurred the universe expanded extremely quickly. Matter did not exist then, but for fun lets say that there were two protons. They could start just a fraction of an inch away from each other and in a fraction of an inch away from each other and less than a second later be a light year away from each other. This is not movement as we would usually conceive of it. Neither one accelerated to accomplish this. The analogy given to help people to understand ants on a balloon. And space is the balloon itself. To ants can be standing on the balloon, not crawling on its surface at all. Suddenly two ants that were close enough to use their feelers on each other are a foot apart. Neither one crawled, but to get to the other a lot of crawling would be required.

Space is still expanding today and since it is a uniform expansion the further away that an object is the faster it is retreating from us. There are galaxies retreating faster than the speed of light. The light that they emit now we will never see.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
In another thread, the big bang expansion was breifly mentioned. A question was asked, rough paraphrase, "Didn't the big bang expand into infinite space?" The answer given was, also rough paraphrase, "No, space itself expanded." I did a tiny bit of reading on this, and I think I understand the idea. My question is, "If space itself expanded, then is the domain of the expansion infinite nothingness?"
Aren't space and the domain the same thing?
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Reality is sometimes weirder than fiction. Space itself expands. The idea of it expanding into something may be nonsensical. Worse yet, the universe could have already have been infinitely large at the time of the Big Bang. We really do not know how compact it was at the time of the Big Bang. As we move backwards in time getting closer and closer to the time of the Big Bang all of our physics breakdown. We not only don't know, with our current state of knowledge we cannot know for sure what happened. When the Big Bang occurred the universe expanded extremely quickly. Matter did not exist then, but for fun lets say that there were two protons. They could start just a fraction of an inch away from each other and in a fraction of an inch away from each other and less than a second later be a light year away from each other. This is not movement as we would usually conceive of it. Neither one accelerated to accomplish this. The analogy given to help people to understand ants on a balloon. And space is the balloon itself. To ants can be standing on the balloon, not crawling on its surface at all. Suddenly two ants that were close enough to use their feelers on each other are a foot apart. Neither one crawled, but to get to the other a lot of crawling would be required.

Space is still expanding today and since it is a uniform expansion the further away that an object is the faster it is retreating from us. There are galaxies retreating faster than the speed of light. The light that they emit now we will never see.

It's kind of mind-boggling in a way. I found this article on the subject of nothingness:


1.) A condition where the raw ingredients to create your "something" didn't exist. You can't have galaxies, stars, planets, or humans without the particles necessary to build them out of. Everything we know of and interact with is made of subatomic matter particles; those are the raw ingredients that our Universe as we know it is built out of.


If you start with a matter-filled Universe, we understand how it can expand, cool, and gravitate to lead to the Universe as we know it today. We know how stars live-and-die, leading to the heavy elements that enable the creation of low-mass stars, rocky planets, organic molecules, and eventually, the possibility of life. But how did we wind up with a matter-filled Universe, instead of one with equal amounts of matter and antimatter? That's the first scientific meaning of getting something from nothing.

2.) Nothingness is the void of empty space. Perhaps you prefer a definition of nothing that contains literally "no things" in it at all. If you follow that line of thinking, then the first definition is inadequate: it clearly contains "something." In order to achieve nothingness, you'll have to get rid of every fundamental constituent of matter. Every quantum of radiation has to go. Every particle and antiparticle, from the ghostly neutrino to whatever dark matter is, must be removed.

If you could somehow remove them all — each and every one — you could ensure that the only thing that was left behind was empty space itself. With no particles or antiparticles, no matter or radiation, no identifiable quanta of any type in your Universe, all you'd have left is the void of empty space itself. To some, that's the true scientific definition of "nothingness."

I think this second definition is the one that I was thinking of, at least in terms of what "nothing" would look like, particularly since this definition also includes the existence of spacetime.

3.) Nothingness as the ideal lowest-energy state possible for spacetime. Right now, our Universe has a zero-point energy, or an energy inherent to space itself, that's at a positive, non-zero value. We do not know whether this is the true "ground state" of the Universe, i.e., the lowest energy state possible, or whether we can still go lower. It's still possible that we're in a false vacuum state, and that the true vacuum, or the true lowest-energy state, will either be closer to zero or may actually go all the way to zero (or below).

To transition there from our current state would likely lead to a catastrophe that forever altered the Universe: a nightmare scenario known as vacuum decay. This would result in many unsavory things for our existence. The photon would become a massive particle, the electromagnetic force would only travel short ranges, and practically all the sunlight our star emits would fail to make its way to Earth.

4.) Nothingness only occurs when you remove the entire Universe and the laws that govern it. This is the most extreme case of all: a case that steps out of reality — out of space, time, and physics itself — to imagine a Platonic ideal of nothingness. We can conceive of removing everything we can imagine: space, time, and the governing rules of reality. Physicists have no definition for anything here; this is pure philosophical nothingness.

In the context of physics, this creates a problem: we cannot make any sense of this sort of nothingness. We'd be compelled to assume that there is such a thing as a state that can exist outside of space and time, and that spacetime itself, as well as the rules that govern all of the physical entities we know of, can then emerge from this hypothesized, idealized state.
 

Ella S.

Dispassionate Goth
I have a great thought experiment that I love to use in order to illustrate this point.

You know those old Arcade games where if you go passed one side of the screen, you loop around and come back out the other? Like in Pac-Man or Joust. Sometimes, falling down brings you back up to the top of the screen, too.

So imagine being in a cube composed of mirrors on the inside. You can hold a light in order to actually see inside of the cube. Everywhere you look, up, down, left, right, you're repeated infinitely based on how large the inside of the cube is.

Here's where it becomes a universe. Take this same observation, but remove the cube itself, leaving you and all of your infinite reflections to fall. Wherever the glass was before, you now "wrap around" back to the top of the cube in the reflection underneath you.

At this point, there's no longer any way to tell where the "edge" of the cube would have been, because the glass is gone and the only other thing that exists in this space is you. You can only tell how far away you are from yourself, thus having a rough estimate of how large the space is.

So let's imagine that, all around you, the space between your reflections starts increasing, as if the walls and ceiling of the original cube had begun to expand. Except, within the cube, it's not expanding "into" anything. The space is just getting stretched further apart.

That's kind of like what we're seeing on a cosmic scale. The difference is that there might not even be an "outside" to our space, like there would be for this non-euclidean cube: space itself exists self-continuously within itself. For all we know, all there is are the reflections, but we don't know how far we would have to travel in order to end up where we started again and thus we don't know how "big" the universe is for sure.

Many models seem to suggest that it used to be much smaller than depicted in this thought experiment, but it's been rapidly expanding over billions of years. We can tell, in part, because the gaps between things are growing.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I didn't intend them to be the same. I'm struggling to find a word to describe the non-space.
But what if there is no non-space? What if space is all there is, and, as it expands, it creates itself; creates is-ness?
 

Truthseeker

Non-debating member when I can help myself
It's My Birthday!
You seem to be unable to accept the fact that space can be curved --you wonder what it's curved IN. Whether you understand it or not, space itself can stop.
I saw a series of videos about General Relativity, and though I graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics, with mostly A's, I got lost in the mathemics behind General Relativity, which is the theory that concerns gravity. Special Relativity mathematics are much simpler, and I understood that. Can you believe that Einstein didn't got his noble prize for that theory, he got it for the Photoelectric effect, which discovered the existence of particles of light called photons? It was a development in Quantum Mechanics. The later Einstein couldn't believe in the probablistic nature of Quantum Mechanics, and said famously "God doesn't play dice with the Universe". I do have some understanding of the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics which involves complex numbers. (A number with a real number part, and imaginary number part.) An imaginary number is gotten by taking the square root of a negative number.
 

wellwisher

Well-Known Member
In another thread, the big bang expansion was breifly mentioned. A question was asked, rough paraphrase, "Didn't the big bang expand into infinite space?" The answer given was, also rough paraphrase, "No, space itself expanded." I did a tiny bit of reading on this, and I think I understand the idea. My question is, "If space itself expanded, then is the domain of the expansion infinite nothingness?"
In Einstein's theory of General Relativity, mass and gravity cause and space and time to curve/bend. The more mass we have the more local space bends; smaller and smaller spheres, and therefore space appears to take up less space.

Just before the BB, when all the mass of the universe appears, spaces is so curved, it appears to be very close and very compact with the primordial atom of the BB. As the primordial atom of the BB expanded, and its mass spreads out, the curvature of space got less and less, and space appeared to get larger and larger; bigger spheres of space. Nothing really changes, except the frame of references, by which we can see space. That defines how curved and therefore how large it will appear to be.

In terms of the future of the universe, the 2nd law states that the entropy of the universe has to increase. While an increase in entropy absorbs energy. This tells us the universe is aging and cannot go back to where it was born, since when it was born it had much less entropy and much more energy. The 2nd law prevents that from ever happening again. The cyclic models are based on perpetual motion. The second law tells us the universe will continue to evolve; age, until it goes away. A new universe will then have to appear all pumped up with the critical energy and low entropy; quanta.
 

Pete in Panama

Active Member
I saw a series of videos about General Relativity, and though I graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics, with mostly A's, I got lost in the mathemics behind General Relativity, which is the theory that concerns gravity. Special Relativity mathematics are much simpler, and I understood that. Can you believe that Einstein didn't got his noble prize for that theory, he got it for the Photoelectric effect, which discovered the existence of particles of light called photons? It was a development in Quantum Mechanics. The later Einstein couldn't believe in the probablistic nature of Quantum Mechanics, and said famously "God doesn't play dice with the Universe". I do have some understanding of the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics which involves complex numbers. (A number with a real number part, and imaginary number part.) An imaginary number is gotten by taking the square root of a negative number.
The story I've heard is that the reason there's no Nobel Prize in mathematics is because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off w/ a mathematician. I enjoy a BS in Environmental Resources though that was when we had global cooling. I still see a greater danger from a new ice age but I digress. Understanding curved and limited space is not easy, and is complicated by those who are not able to be humble enough to differentiate between what they want to believe and what is.
 
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Pete in Panama

Active Member
I was just asking what the difference between "space" and "nothing" is. I don't see how such a question can lead to the conclusion that it lacks humility.
Many possible reasons, one may be because I lack the humility to understand your questions, another is that your arrogance forbids your being able to accept a new idea --it's all conjecture and I'm thinking we could both gain by rejoining together back on the Planet Earth.

My take is that we cannot differentiate between "space" and "nothing" because the question presents a false dichotomy. Let's turn to what is observable (therefore what can be known) --apart from that which is our conjecture and can not be known.

Space appears to be finite in its expanse. What I'm saying is that we can't talk about what's "beyond" the limits of space because what I'm saying is that there's no "beyond" that is beyond space. We can't know what is outside our universe, the closest we can get is (like w/ a black hole) observe a massive gravitational field in our universe but we got to remember that the field is in our universe and what's beyond the event horizon is conjecture. I can live w/ not being able to know something, I'm hoping you can too.
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
Many possible reasons, one may be because I lack the humility to understand your questions, another is that your arrogance forbids your being able to accept a new idea --it's all conjecture and I'm thinking we could both gain by rejoining together back on the Planet Earth.

My take is that we cannot differentiate between "space" and "nothing" because the question presents a false dichotomy. Let's turn to what is observable (therefore what can be known) --apart from that which is our conjecture and can not be known.

Space appears to be finite in its expanse. What I'm saying is that we can't talk about what's "beyond" the limits of space because what I'm saying is that there's no "beyond" that is beyond space. We can't know what is outside our universe, the closest we can get is (like w/ a black hole) observe a massive gravitational field in our universe but we got to remember that the field is in our universe and what's beyond the event horizon is conjecture. I can live w/ not being able to know something, I'm hoping you can too.

If there's any arrogance on my part, it's purely unintentional and unconscious. But consider a straight line emanating from a point in space. If it were possible to travel along that straight line, without making any changes in course, a heading of 0°, straight and level, are you saying that it would not be a straight line? If one follows that straight line all the way to the end of the expanse, to where there are no more stars and planets - no particles whatsoever - what would you see in front of you? What would be there to prevent you from going any further into the emptiness that lies beyond?
 
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