Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Classic episode - What came before the Big Bang?

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

What could have caused the Big Bang, and what came before it?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't try. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. Kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Gracias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow.

That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great Vibras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dashes Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case.

That is a cold case that has DNA. Right now, in a backlog, will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen, and I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you thought as an adult that you'd been alive forever, and then you discovered, no, you actually had a childhood and you were born, and you would want to know all about that. That would be surprising.

That would be surprising. And actually, that's sort of the situation science was in. For a long time, astronomers thought the universe is fixed. It's constant. All the stars were just sort of hanging out there in space, not moving, and they'd been like that forever. Hi, I'm Daniel. Is this Horan? So I'm a particle physicist.

I smash protons together at CERN in my day job to try to figure out what is the basic nature of matter. What do you smash as a hobby then? Yeah, well, you know, when you're a particle physicist, you learn to solve problems by smashing stuff together. So whatever's around me. And I'm a cartoonist, and my job is to sit in my pajamas all day and draw funny things. That's not how you started, right? You didn't grow up thinking I'm going to be a cartoonist. No, I started off as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I study robotics. I have a PhD in robotics. But somewhere along the line, I started drawing comics, and that kind of took off for me.

And this is our podcast, Daniel and Jorge. Explain the universe. Today we're going to talk about how it all began. The biggest of questions. The Big Bang. What happened at the very beginning of the universe? What happened before the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep, basic question by the origin of our universe.

What do you think about it? What do you know about it? What do you imagine might have happened before the start of our universe? We went out and we asked people on the street what they thought happened just before the Big Bang. Well, there was a bunch of particles in the universe and then it combined together and poof. We created. It had all the energy of the universe, so then when it happened, that's how it was all dispersed. So most people seem to have some idea that, first of all, the Big Bang is more than just a TV show, right?

The idea for the signs came before the TV show. I was kind of relieved to hear that. Everyone seems to know it sort of marks the beginning of the universe. Right. It's the moment of creation or the starting of the clock of the universe where everything came from. But what exactly happened during the Big Bang? And most interestingly, what happened before the Big Bang? Right. And that's fascinating to me.

And these are the best questions, the ones that try to answer the question. What did everything come from? It sort of touches on the philosophical. Like, why are we here? If you knew how the Big Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might get some insight into what the purpose of life is or how to live your life or stuff. So to me, these are like really good, deep, basic questions.

So we made a list of the four things we think you should know about the Big Bang. The first one is that the entire universe was once really small. Maybe, we think. Let's talk about that. What do you mean maybe? Well, it's an interesting question. We know that the universe had a beginning, right? And how do we know that?

We know that because things are expanding. Things are moving away from each other. That was the major discovery like 100 years ago. people looked out in the stars and discovered that they're all moving away from us okay so like we thought everything would still like we were frozen in a gel or something the stars were just like there sitting there generally speaking but then they discovered that actually things are moving away from each other that's right and everything is moving away from us and everything is moving away from everything else they just looked at stars and you can

measure how fast a star is moving relative to us by seeing how its light is stretched or shrunk, depending on whether it's moving away from us or towards. It's like a Doppler shift. Like the highway patrol measuring your speed, you can tell how fast you're going. Yeah, exactly. It's not like they looked at the starts and said, oh, now that one's over there. It must have moved. It's like some other information, right? Right. So they looked out there and they measured all this stuff and they said, whoa, everything's stretching out and moving away from each other. So then the very natural consequences to say, well, run that backwards. What does that mean? It means things might have been smaller and more dense.

and maybe even come from a little spot. Like if you hit the rewind button, if you see things getting bigger now, if you hit the rewind button, for a while, what happens? Exactly. And those are the mental games people were playing. And actually the phrase,

Big Bang, was a joke that people made up to mock that idea. They're like, look how ridiculous this idea is. It is kind of a silly sounding name, right? Yeah, it was whimsical. It was like a Donald Trump insult, you know, for somebody else's... A bigly bang.

Yes, exactly, the Bigley Bang. Well, if you were like a respectable scientist today and you had to name this event, you wouldn't call it to Big Bang, or you think that it was a good name. Oh, man, if I was on a marketing committee, discover the new name for it, the moment of creation. No, I think Big Bang is actually pretty good. You got your alliteration. It's short, it's pithy, you know, it's pretty well done. I think that's probably why it survived so long. Because everyone wants the universe to starve the bank, right?

that's right so you play back the movie of the universe and it tells us that everything was once much closer together and then much much closer and then much much closer and if you keep thinking about it things may have been really really really close together that's right yeah they just keep extrapolating down to a point and around the same time Einstein came up with all of his ideas of general relativity and thinking about gravity and how the universe works and people were playing with those equations and discovering that those equations actually actually actually predicted that the universe could start from a point. They were consistent with Einstein's ideas of gravity. What do you mean? It was consistent.

Meaning that you can construct a universe that starts from a point and then it blows up and expands and that totally makes sense from an Einstein gravity point of view. Like, it follows the rules. It's allowed. Okay. Meaning that nothing

weird happens. Like you can cram that much stuff into such a small space. According to Einstein. Okay. What is it? Which is pretty well accepted as a smart guy. He knows what he's talking about. But, you know, there are some issues there. The original idea was the Big Bang was this really dense hot blob of stuff and then it blew up and expanded into things we know. And, you know, that was a weird idea for a long time and people didn't believe it for a long time. It was in the 60s that they finally found the

first concrete piece of evidence that maybe the Big Bang had happened. And that's when they they discovered the thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation. So it was weird to think about so much stuff and matter and stars being crammed to small space. Yeah, because it meant the universe wasn't always this dark and cold and empty place that we know today. It was like a hot, dense blob, like the center of the sun. It was a hot mess.

It was a hot mess, exactly. The universe was not well organized when it was young. So, yeah, so they said, Okay, but now they saw something like you called the cosmic microwave background radiation that said yes, that's a clear indication things were a hot mess before. Yeah, they said, if things were really hot and dense

a long time ago, then they should have given off this special kind of light, and we should still be able to see it today. And they went out and they found it. You can see it, like... You can see it if you have a special radio telescope. And some guys built a fancy radio telescope. They weren't even actually looking for this background radiation. and they just had a hiss in their telescope.

They had this noise in their telescope. And coincidentally, some people, a couple of years earlier, had predicted, oh, if you build this kind of telescope, and the Big Bang happened, you'll hear this hiss. And they turned on their telescope, they heard this hiss, and they're like, what is this? We can't get rid of this noise. And then two years later, they won the Nobel Prize. That's a great discovery. It's a pretty happy discovery.

You're afraid. You're going to get fired, but then they're like, oh, that mistake you made, it's the discovery of the universe. That's right. So that's the Big Bang. It's everything with once really small and then it just kind of explode it out into what we have today.

That's right. It's the whole idea is that the universe has a beginning and that it expanded into what we know today. And that was the sort of first idea of the Big Bang. Like maybe everything came from a point. And a lot of people, when they think about the Big Bang, they think about the universe starting in a singularity,

meaning a bunch of stuff in zero volume. All of it on top of each other in the same zero space. Exactly. And it's mind-blowing to imagine like take the sun and cram it down into the amount of space

you have for a green of sand. Hard to imagine, right? Now make it even smaller. Now add every other star in the universe on top of it. It's like your brain can't even fathom. It could even be the same thing, right? Yeah, it's not really the same thing.

It's just all the energy, all the energy density that we currently have in the universe was crammed into that tiny little space. Okay. That was sort of the early idea. And you can imagine, like, a big, empty universe of space with a tiny dot of matter in it. And, of course, that engenders a lot of questions.

Like, where did that tiny dot of matter come from, right? Was there only one? How was it created, right? But before we keep going, let's take a short break. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad,

X1 carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity. With Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance, it keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not?

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The Holiday Rush. Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola, it's HoneyGerman, and my podcast, Grasias Come Again, is back. This season we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community.

You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. But the whole pretending and coat, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura podcast network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness,

the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of this. Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family

secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets, Season 12, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, so that's the Big Bang. And so the next thing people should know is that the Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago.

Billion with a B. A billion years ago. Yeah. Man, I can't even remember what I did. This morning. 14 minutes ago. That's how old the universe is from that moment of the Big Bang.

Yeah. So the universe has been around since the Big Bang about 14 billion years. And, you know, for scale, the Earth has been around about four and a half billion years. That's when our solar system was formed. Right, right. Well, how do we know how old the universe is? Like, yeah, like how can you tell? Yeah, well, we are seeing it expand.

And so the simplest way is to just extrapolate back. Say, how fast is it expanding and extrapolate that expansion back until the zero point? So, like, if you look at the furthest stars, you know how fast we're going, you can just hit the rewind button. It would take about 14 billion years for it to connect to everything else. Yeah, so we're pretty sure that something happened 14 billion years ago. This expansion of space happened 14 billion years ago. But these days scientists are a little fuzzier on what exactly the Big Bang was.

So idea zero was a tiny dot with all the matter and it explodes into the universe. problems with this idea are one that you can't really have tiny dots of infinite density so Einstein's told me before you could well that was Einstein's idea and the idea is consistent with Einstein's gravity but Einstein's theories of gravity don't account for quantum mechanics quantum mechanics something that came after Einstein

he was never really very comfortable with and quantum mechanics is a whole big long story but the thing we need to understand is that it says you can't have things that are super duper tiny There might be a smallest space. It might be the smallest distance. Things get fuzzy. Yeah.

Like at some point you can't get unfuzzier. That's right. Exactly. There's a basic unit of fuzziness. Like imagine space being pixelated, right? Like you can't talk about something smaller than one pixel. Right. So we think that quantum mechanics is probably correct.

And if you... The big pixel. The big pixel. That's right. The first pixel is the universe. So we think if you try to follow Einstein and extrapolate the universe down to a point, general relativity probably works but we think it probably breaks

when you get down to really, really tiny distances and really heavy stuff but nobody's ever seen that happen because you have to look inside a black hole or go back in time and see the Big Bang but these days we have a slightly fuzzier version of the idea of the Big Bang rather than a point of matter that then explodes

into space we think of the universe as being created as a blob of space and matter A blob of space and matter yeah so like it was It's like a blob of space. Like a tiny universe with not much space. So instead of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter in it,

now imagine a tiny piece of space filled with energy and matter. Okay, and what's outside of that little space? We have no idea. Like, seriously, we can't even imagine. Inconceivable. Right, but we do know that space can be variable in size. Space can expand. And these days, we have a more modern idea of the Big Bang

as that expansion of that space. So it's kind of like a bubble, like a bubble that's a space, and then there's stuff in the bubble. So you're saying both those things blew up. Exactly. And this is the more modern idea that space itself can expand. And so if you're out there thinking, what is he talking about? How can space expand? What is it expanding into?

Everything has to be in something, right? And the answer is we don't know. We used to think of space as just like emptiness. And we could go a whole episode about just what space is. And I think we probably will. keep listening. But these days we think of space as a thing because it can expand,

it can bend, and it can ripple. So we know it has all these properties. So it might be that this bubble of space in the early universe was in some sort of super meta-deep space that we have never really discovered or nothing.

It could be that it doesn't have to hang in something else. It's just the edge. But space itself was smaller. That much we know. Space was small. Space was smaller and the stuff in it was crammed in really, really small. That's right.

And then about 14 billion years ago, for some reason, do we know why? We don't know why. It decided it didn't want to be that small anymore. That's right, yeah. And that was the moment that space was created, and then it expanded like crazy. It's something we call inflation. Inflation is not, you know, why your money doesn't work as well every year. I mean, that is inflation, but it's, and I don't know, why do we do this in science?

We take an idea, a word that everybody uses to mean one thing. and we just like use that same word to mean something totally different. But it fits what it describes. The universe inflated like a balloon, like a bowl, right? Yes. Okay. It's a good descriptive name from that sense. So the universe inflated, that whole balloon inflated,

and everything inside it got stretched. Okay. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy. It's like the universe expanded in space by a factor of 10 to the 30. That's 10 with 30 zeros on it, some crazy huge number. And it did it in this really small amount of, of time, 10 to the minus 30. So that's zero with 30 zeros after the decimal place and then a 1. So this incredible expansion, a huge expansion of space of 10 to the 30 in this tiny amount of

time, 10 to the minus 30. It's hard to really even fathom. It was in a rush to get big. Yes. And it's still getting bigger today. And the other thing that's important to understand is that space didn't get created like on the outside of the universe. It's not like they made more room. It's stuff, the space inside the universe, stretched and it was created. So, like, between two particles, you had a certain amount of space, then all of a sudden you had extra space between particles.

So everything's getting stretched out from the inside, also, not just from the outside. That's also continuing to happen. Like, the expansion of the universe today, the fact the universe is getting bigger and bigger is happening all around. This is more space being created. The third thing we should talk about today is that we don't know what happened before the Big Bang. Like before this little bubble blew up, what happened before? But before we get into that, let's take a quick break.

Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity. With Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance, that keeps up with your business, other way around. Whoa, this thing moves.

Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carp, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This person writes, My boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up.

Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop.

Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I wouldn't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards. If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan,

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It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is like totally territory for speculation and philosophy.

We have pretty good theories about what happened during the Big Bang, the idea of the inflation. We even have some experimental evidence to back it up, and it's a pretty solid theory these days, that inflation happened. But what do you mean experimental? Like, we can't measure the Big Bang, can we? Right. So we can't go back in time and see it, right? But we can do things like detectives do after a murder, and we can look for clues and say, are the clues that we see in the universe today consistent with this story or with that other story?

Right. So we can sift through the clues from the Big Bang and say, it looks like. like the universe was created, and if inflation happened, it probably created these ripples in that plasma. We can see those ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation. It's really an incredible golden age of cosmology. They're doing all this really precision work to understand exactly what happened and what we know. But we can only see up to a certain point. And before that, it's just speculation. Before that, it's just speculation. So one popular idea is that there's this kind of matter called inflationary matter, or inflatons. And it has

some weird gravitational properties, and those gravitational properties cause inflation. Like, suddenly they came into being inside of this hot mess, and it's like, we need to get out of here. Yeah, it's this never-ending loop of questions, right? So you say, well, the Big Bang was inflation. What caused inflation? Inflationary matter. Well, what created inflationary matter? It's like, dot, dot, dot. You could just keep asking that question forever. And I think we will be asking that question forever. We'll always be pushing back and trying to understand until we get back to, negative infinity in time, we're never going to have a solid answer. But that's

part of the fun, right? It's not like it's the journey as much as the destination. There's some cool ideas there about what happened before that point, right? That's right, yeah. Like maybe the whole universe was filled with inflationary matter, and in some places it decayed into

normal matter, and then inflation happened. And if that's the case, then you have like our universe is one spot inside some huge mega universe of inflationary matter and maybe at other points in that mega universe there are also other dots that turned into what we call pocket universes or like the zits of the face of the of the mega universe mega zits on the mega universe yeah and that might be true maybe like our universe it's just like

a little bubble in a big sea of other bubbles that's right exactly that's one idea that's one idea and we have no way to really to test that idea is the problem because there's no way for us to ever reach those other bubbles because if that's the case, if that's really the reality of our, of the situation of nature, it means that inflation is still happening because that inflationary matter is still constantly expanding. So those other universes, those other bubbles are getting pushed away from us much, much faster than the speed of light because it will never like hang out. You can't send a message there. You can't ever see it. You can't ever go there. And scientifically, that's a big problem. Not because I,

really want to go to the beaches and some other bubble universe, but because if you want to prove that it's true, you have to do an experiment. You have to find some evidence. You have to do, you have to have a theory that can be confirmed. If you have a theory that predict something you can never test, then it's not really a scientific theory or a useful one. It's like saying, it's just a guess. Yeah, it's a guess. So that's one theory, maybe we're a bubble in a sea of other universes. What's another idea for what happened before the Big Bang? Well, another idea is, is that maybe there's a cycle, right? Maybe the big bang was caused by a big crunch, right?

And to understand that, you have to think about sort of the future first. So the big bang happened, everything expands out, and then one question is like, are things going to keep expanding? We don't really know, but one possibility is they keep expanding forever, and the universe just sort of drifts out

into this endlessly cold, boring, bland situation. But another possibility is that it slows down, stops and then falls back in everything rushes back and gravity pulls everything back into a to recreate that hot mess yeah deflation well I think you just invented a scientific theory

Oh can I go back and change it to my son's name Oliveration The deflation theory would say that the universe comes back falls into and then collapses back into a little hot mess again A little hot mess it's like recovering your youth right It's like a middle-aged crisis or whatever. And then it just bounces back out again.

Yeah, and that would be a cycle. So big crunch, big bang, big crunch, big bang. That could be. Big bang, us, big crunch, big bang it again. Maybe somebody else. Somebody else. Better looking versions of us. Yeah, impossible, impossible day.

Yeah, so that's another idea is that what happened before is like more and more universes. Yeah. And there's something nice about that because it explains both that the argument, universe had a beginning, and it also gives you an explanation for what happened all the way back to the beginning of time, because it returns you to the possibility that the universe is infinitely old, right? Because that could have been happening forever. It allows you to have this sort of finite length of time for our universe without limiting you to finiteness for the whole universe, sort of like the... Right. So time could be infinite, but space could be finite.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that brings us to the last crazy idea, which is maybe there was nothing before the Big Bang. Nothing. Not even time. Not even time, right? We think space was created in the Big Bang and space is expanded and all that stuff. So there could have been no space before? No space and no time, right?

And it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that is. I mean, we have a hard time imagining like what will happen after we die. Will the universe continue without us, right? Now I try to imagine the universe without space and time. What does that even mean? And you have to think also about what time is itself. Like, what does it mean for there to not be time, right? There's no time in which there's no time.

There's no time for that to happen, right? And a lot of people think about time as sort of the organizing principle of the universe. Maybe you've heard of the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us that entropy is always increasing in the universe. And so they imagine... Things are getting messier. Things are getting messier and messier and messier. That's right, getting more and more spread out.

Forward in time. and so some people think that that is time that time is measured by entropy and created by entropy and that before the Big Bang if there was nothing no space then there was no time and that sounds like an odd

idea but in other ways we're very familiar with it like if you stand on the North Pole and you ask which way is North well there is nothing north the North Star oh you blew us up to be a mystery world there

I'm going to write to Stephen Hawking and tell you it was wrong. Thank you. That's actually his phrase is, you know, maybe there's no north of north. There's no before the zero time.

Yeah, because if you're standing on a sphere and you're the north pole of it, there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go. There's no more northiness than the north pole. The tape ends when you try to rewind it more. That's right. And that's something we're comfortable with.

We're accepting the fact that a sphere has like a limit and edge and it's reasonable for that to be nothing beyond it. But when we think, of time we tend to think of in a line and so we want there to be something before it or at least for there to be a reason

why it started here and not somewhere else or some other time. It's a very natural, I think, idea to have intuitively to think that something should have been before then. But it could be that there was nothing. That things were created at that moment and there was nothing before that. And then we came.

Yeah. We dropped the mic. We came, we made this podcast. And that's a summary of all you need. the whole universe, basically. In a nutshell. And any of those theories, first of all, those are very difficult to test. And it's hard to imagine how we'll ever know, right?

It might be that there aren't any clues in the rubble of the universe to tell us which one is which. It might be. Although I like to have faith in future scientists coming up with clever ideas for ways to test these theories, which right now seem impossible to test,

but in the future, people can be clever about it. able to see beyond the Big Bang. Yeah, maybe. Maybe they'll find some evidence in the current rubble that tells them, oh, it was this or is that, or is the other thing. But even if you get there, imagine having an answer

to one of these questions, right? What do you think knowing what happened before the Big Bang would tell you, like, how would it change your life? I think it would change everybody's life. I think it's the kind of knowledge that would filter into the global consciousness. Think about how quantum mechanics

has changed the way people think about things. that there's randomness in the universe. The universe is not following a fixed set of rules, but that those rules have fuzz in them. You think it's changed the global consciousness, the way you sort of live in the world. And not just in new agey people, you know, but in everybody thinking about the universe

is being a little different from what they imagined. Do you have a question you wish we would cover? We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at feedback at danielandhorpe.com. Ah, come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra Light, Ultra Powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel Core Ultra processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with

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