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by jerf
2507 days ago
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The idea that it is meaningless to speak of "before the Big Bang" is not a universal, mathematically-proved truth, but a contingent result of particular theories of the Big Bang that include it being a singularity at a particular time 0.000000..., at which point there is no meaningful "before" or any spatial directions either. Just as physicists discuss how the singularities in black holes may be removed via a theory of quantum gravity, further theories about the Big Bang may or may not remove the singularity and may or may not result in a meaningful "before" to speak about. In fact there are a number of such theories, it's just that AFAIK none of them have predicted something better than the standard model well enough for the singularity model to be definitively replaced, though I think if you polled physicists and asked them about whether they think there was "really" a singularity there or if it's just an artifact of our current poor theories, the vast bulk would say it's the latter. But in the absence of quantum gravity, General Relativity is the best established tool we have for investigating this sort of thing, and that tool says it was a singularity. We have lots of other tools that say other things, but none of them are established like GR is. |
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This is neither here nor there, but that number would be 0.
It's possible that 'time' has no minimum, but as far as I am aware the solution can be continuously extended to include 0. If not then you might as well say that the universe has existed for all time, the clocks were just running a bit slow at the start.