Speaker 1: What if you thought, as an adult that you've been
Speaker 1: alive forever and then you discovered no, you actually had
Speaker 1: a childhood and you were born, and you would want
Speaker 1: to know all about that. It would be surprising. And
Speaker 1: actually that's sort of the situation science was it. For
Speaker 1: a long time astronomer thought the universe is fixed, it's constant.
Speaker 1: All the stars are just sort of hanging out there
Speaker 1: in space, not moving, and they've been like that forever. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel, is this Horran? So? I'm a particle physicist.
Speaker 1: I smash protons together at certain in my day job
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what is the basic nature
Speaker 1: of matter? What do you smash as a hobby ban? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know, when you're a particle physicist, you learned to
Speaker 1: solve problems by smashing stuff together. So whatever's around me,
Speaker 1: And I'm a cartoonist and my job is to sit
Speaker 1: in my pajamas all day and for funny things. That's
Speaker 1: not how you started, right. You didn't grow up thinking
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a cartoonist. No, I started off
Speaker 1: as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I studied robotics. I
Speaker 1: have a PhD in robotics. But um, somewhere along the line,
Speaker 1: I started joining comics and that kind of took off
Speaker 1: for me. And this is our podcast Daniel and Jorge
Speaker 1: explained the universe. Today, we're going to talk about how
Speaker 1: it all began. The biggest of questions, the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: What happened at the very beginning of the universe, What
Speaker 1: happened before the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep basic
Speaker 1: question about the origin of our universe. What do you
Speaker 1: think about it, what do you know about it? What
Speaker 1: do you imagine might have happened before the start of
Speaker 1: our universe. We went out and we asked people on
Speaker 1: the street what they thought happened just before the Big Bang. Um, well,
Speaker 1: there was a bunch of particles in the universe, and
Speaker 1: then they combined together and had all the energy of
Speaker 1: the universe. So then when it happened, that's how it
Speaker 1: was all dispersed. So most people seem to have some
Speaker 1: idea that, first of all, the Big Bang is more
Speaker 1: than just a TV show, right, that the idea for
Speaker 1: the science came before the TV show. I was kind
Speaker 1: of relieved to hear that everyone seems to know it's uh.
Speaker 1: It sort of marks the beginning of the universe. Right,
Speaker 1: it's a moment of creation or the starting of the
Speaker 1: clock of the universe, and everything came from. But what
Speaker 1: exactly happened during the Big Bang? And most interestingly, what
Speaker 1: happened before the Big Bang? Right? And that's that's fascinating
Speaker 1: to me. And these are the best questions, the ones
Speaker 1: that like try to answer the question where did everything
Speaker 1: come from? This sort of touches on the philosophical like
Speaker 1: why are we here? If you knew how the Big
Speaker 1: Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might
Speaker 1: get some insight into like what the purpose of life
Speaker 1: is or how to live your life or stuff. So
Speaker 1: to me, these are like really good, deep, basic questions.
Speaker 1: So we made a list of the four things we
Speaker 1: think you should know about the Big Band. The first
Speaker 1: one is that the entire universe was once really small.
Speaker 1: Maybe we think, let's talk about that. What do you
Speaker 1: mean maybe, Well, it's an interesting question. We know that
Speaker 1: the universe had a beginning, right, And how do we
Speaker 1: know that? We know that because things are expanding, things
Speaker 1: are moving away from each other. That was the major discovery,
Speaker 1: Like a hundred years ago, people looked out in the
Speaker 1: stars and discovered that they're all moving away from us. Okay,
Speaker 1: So like we thought everything would still like we were
Speaker 1: frozen in a gel or something. The stars were just
Speaker 1: like they're sitting there, generally speaking. But then they discovered
Speaker 1: that they actually things are moving away from each other,
Speaker 1: that's right, And everything is moving away from us, and
Speaker 1: everything is moving away from everything else. They just looked
Speaker 1: at stars, and you can measure how fast a star
Speaker 1: is moving relative to us by by seeing how it's
Speaker 1: light is stretched or shrunk, depending on whether it's moving
Speaker 1: away from us or towards the second dopler shift, like
Speaker 1: the highway patrol measuring your speed, you can sort of
Speaker 1: you can tell how fast you're going. Yeah, exactly. It's
Speaker 1: not like they looked at the stars and said, oh,
Speaker 1: now it's that once over there, it must have moved.
Speaker 1: It's like that's some other information, right, right, So they
Speaker 1: looked out there and they measured all this stuff, and
Speaker 1: they said, whoa, everything's stretching out and moving away from
Speaker 1: each other. So then the very natural consequences to say, well,
Speaker 1: run that backwards. What does that mean? It means things
Speaker 1: might have been smaller and more dense and maybe even
Speaker 1: come from a little spot like if you had the
Speaker 1: rewind bunt. If you see things maketting bigger, now, if
Speaker 1: you had the rewind bunt, wow for a while, what
Speaker 1: happens exactly? And those are the mental games people were playing.
Speaker 1: And actually the phrase big Bang was a joke that
Speaker 1: people made up to mock that idea. They're like, look,
Speaker 1: how ridiculous this idea is. It's kind of a silly
Speaker 1: sounding name, right, Yeah, it was like whimsical. It was.
Speaker 1: It was like a Donald Trump insult, you know, for
Speaker 1: somebody else's big Lee Bang. Yeah, the big Bang. Well,
Speaker 1: if you were like a respectable scientist today and you
Speaker 1: had to name this event, you wouldn't call it the
Speaker 1: big Bang? Or do you think that it was a
Speaker 1: good name? Oh man, if I was on a marketing committee,
Speaker 1: discover a new name for it, the moment of creation. Um, now,
Speaker 1: I think big Bang is actually pretty good. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: got your literation. It's short, it's pithy, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty well done. I think that's probably why it
Speaker 1: survived so long, because everyone wants the universe to start
Speaker 1: with the bank. That's right. So you played back the
Speaker 1: movie of the Universe, and it tells us that everything
Speaker 1: was once much closer together, and then much much closer,
Speaker 1: and then much much closer, and if you keep thinking
Speaker 1: about it, things may have been really really really close together.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, they just keep extrapolating down to a point.
Speaker 1: And around the same time Einstein came up with all
Speaker 1: of his ideas of general relativity and thinking about gravity
Speaker 1: and how the universe works, and people were playing with
Speaker 1: those equations and discovering that those equations actually predicted that
Speaker 1: the universe could start from a point. They were consistent
Speaker 1: with Einstein's ideas of gravity. What you mean consider it
Speaker 1: was consistent, meaning that that it, um, you can construct
Speaker 1: a universe that starts from a point and then it
Speaker 1: blows up and expands, And that totally makes sense from
Speaker 1: an Einstein gravity point of view, like it follows the rules.
Speaker 1: It's allowed, meaning that nothing weird happens, like you can
Speaker 1: cram that much stuff into such as small space according
Speaker 1: to Einstein, right, which is pretty well accepted as a
Speaker 1: smart guy, he knows what he's talking about. But you know,
Speaker 1: there are some issues there. Um. The original idea was
Speaker 1: the Big Bang was this really dense hot blob of
Speaker 1: stuff and then it blew up and expanded into things
Speaker 1: we know, and you know, that was a weird idea
Speaker 1: for a long time, and people didn't believe it for
Speaker 1: a long time. It was in the sixties that they
Speaker 1: finally found the first like concrete piece of evidence that
Speaker 1: maybe the Big Bang had happened. And that's when they
Speaker 1: discovered the thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation. So
Speaker 1: it was weird to think about so much stuff and
Speaker 1: matter and stars and being cramped to small space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I meant the universe wasn't always this dark and
Speaker 1: cold and empty place that we know today. It was
Speaker 1: like a hot, dense blob like the center of the sun.
Speaker 1: It was a hot mess exactly. The universe was not
Speaker 1: well organized when it was young. Um. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: they said, okay, now, but now they saw something like
Speaker 1: you call it the cosmic microwave background radiation that said, yes,
Speaker 1: that's a clear indication things were a hot mess before. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They said, if things were really hot and dense a
Speaker 1: long time ago, then they should have given off this
Speaker 1: special kind of light and we should still be able
Speaker 1: to see it today. And they went out and they
Speaker 1: found it. You can see it like you can see
Speaker 1: it if you have a special radio telescope, and some
Speaker 1: guys built a fancy radio telescope. They weren't even actually
Speaker 1: looking for this background radiation and they just had a
Speaker 1: hiss in their in their telescope. They had this noise
Speaker 1: in their telescope. And coincidentally, some people a couple of
Speaker 1: years earlier had predicted, oh, if you build this kind
Speaker 1: of telescope, you'll and the big Bang happened. You'll hear
Speaker 1: this hiss and they turn on their telescope. They heard
Speaker 1: this hiss and they're like, what is this. We can't
Speaker 1: get rid of this noise. And then two years later
Speaker 1: the one the Nobel Prize. That's a great discovery. It
Speaker 1: was a pretty happy you're gonna get fired, but then
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, that mistake you made. It's the discovery
Speaker 1: of the universe. That's right. So that's a big bang.
Speaker 1: It's everything was once really small and then it's just
Speaker 1: gonna explode it out into what we have today. That's right.
Speaker 1: That's the whole idea, is that the universe has a
Speaker 1: beginning and then it expanded into what we know today. Um,
Speaker 1: And that was the sort of first idea of the
Speaker 1: big bang, like maybe everything came from a point, and people,
Speaker 1: a lot of people, when they think about the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: they think about the universe starting in a singularity, meaning
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff in zero volume, all of it
Speaker 1: on top of each other, in the same zero space exactly.
Speaker 1: And it's mind blowing to imagine, Like, take out the
Speaker 1: Sun and cram it down into the amount of space
Speaker 1: you have for a grain of sand. Hard to imagine,
Speaker 1: right now, make it even small. Now at every other
Speaker 1: star in the universe on top of it. It's like
Speaker 1: your brain in the same thing, right, Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: not really the same thing. It's just all the energy,
Speaker 1: all the all the energy density that we can have
Speaker 1: in the universe was cramed into that tiny little space.
Speaker 1: That was sort of the early idea. And you can
Speaker 1: imagine like a big empty universe of space with a
Speaker 1: tiny dot of matter in it, And of course that
Speaker 1: engenders a lot of questions like where did that tiny
Speaker 1: dot a matter come from? Right? Was there only one? Um?
Speaker 1: How was it created? Right? But before we keep going,
Speaker 1: let's take a short break. Well, so that's a big bang,
Speaker 1: and so the next thing people should know is that
Speaker 1: the Big Bang happened about fourteen billion years ago billion
Speaker 1: with a b billion years ago and I can't even
Speaker 1: remember what I did this morning fourteen minutes ago. That's
Speaker 1: how old universe is from that moment of the Big Bang. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the universe has been around since the Big Bang
Speaker 1: about fourteen billion years and you know, for scale, the
Speaker 1: Earth has been around about four and a half billion years.
Speaker 1: That's when our solar system was formed. Well, how do
Speaker 1: you how do you how do we know how old
Speaker 1: the universe is? Like, yeah, like how can you tell? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we are seeing it expand and so the simplest way
Speaker 1: is to just extrapolate back, say how fast is it expanding?
Speaker 1: And extrapolate that expansion back until the zero point. So
Speaker 1: like if you look at it, the furthest stars you see,
Speaker 1: you know how fast we're going. You can just like
Speaker 1: hit the rewind button. It would take about fourteen billion
Speaker 1: years for it to connect to everything else. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we're pretty sure that something happened fourteen billion years ago.
Speaker 1: This expansion of space happened fourteen billion years ago. But
Speaker 1: these days scientists are a little fuzzier on what exactly
Speaker 1: the Big Bang was. So idea zero was a tiny
Speaker 1: dot with all the matter and explodes into the universe um.
Speaker 1: Problems with this idea are one that you can't really
Speaker 1: have tiny dots of infinite density, so Einstein told me
Speaker 1: before you could. Well, that was Einstein's idea, and the
Speaker 1: idea is consistent with Einstein's gravity, but Einstein's theories of
Speaker 1: gravity don't account for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics something that
Speaker 1: came after Einstein he was never really very comfortable with,
Speaker 1: and quantum mechanics is a whole, big, long story. But
Speaker 1: the thing we need to understand is that it says
Speaker 1: you can't have things that are super duper tiny. There
Speaker 1: might be the smallest space, there might be the smallest distance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like at some point you can't get unfuzzier. That's right, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's a basic unit of fuzziness. Like imagine space being pixelated, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can't talk about something smaller than one pixel.
Speaker 1: So we think that quantum mechanics is probably correct. And
Speaker 1: if the big pixel, that's right, the first pixel in
Speaker 1: the universe. So we think if you try to follow
Speaker 1: Einstein extrapolate the universe down to point general relativity probably works,
Speaker 1: but we think it probably breaks when you get down
Speaker 1: to really really tiny distances and really heavy stuff. But
Speaker 1: nobody's ever seen that happen. You have to look inside
Speaker 1: a black hole or go back in time and see
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. But these days we have a slightly
Speaker 1: fuzzier version of the idea of the Big Bang. Rather
Speaker 1: then a point of matter that then explodes into space,
Speaker 1: we think of the universe is being created as a
Speaker 1: blob of space and matter and then and matter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like it was, it's a like a blob of space,
Speaker 1: like a tiny universe with not much space. So instead
Speaker 1: of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter
Speaker 1: in it, now imagine a tiny piece of space filled
Speaker 1: with energy and matter. Okay, and what's outside of that
Speaker 1: little space we have no idea, Like seriously, we can't
Speaker 1: even imagine inconceivable, right, But we do know that space
Speaker 1: can be variable in size, space can expand, and these
Speaker 1: days we have a more modern idea of the Big
Speaker 1: Bang as that expansion of that space kind of like
Speaker 1: a bubble, Like a bubble that's a space, and then
Speaker 1: there's stuff in the bubble. So you're saying both those
Speaker 1: things blew up exactly. And this is the more modern
Speaker 1: idea that space itself can expand. And so if you're
Speaker 1: out there thinking, what is he talking about? How can
Speaker 1: space expand? What is it expanding into? Everything has to
Speaker 1: be in something, right, And the answer is, we don't know.
Speaker 1: We think used to think of space is just like emptiness,
Speaker 1: and we can go a whole episode about just what
Speaker 1: spaces and I think we really will, so keep listening.
Speaker 1: But these days we think of space as a thing
Speaker 1: because it can expand, it can bend, and it can ripple,
Speaker 1: so we know it has all these properties. So it
Speaker 1: might be that this bubble of space in the early
Speaker 1: universe was in some sort of super meta deep space
Speaker 1: that we have never really discovered, or nothing. It could
Speaker 1: be that it doesn't have to hang in something else.
Speaker 1: It's just the edge. And space itself was smaller that
Speaker 1: that much. We know space was small. Space was smaller,
Speaker 1: and the stuff in it was crammed in really really
Speaker 1: small to try it. And then about fourteen billion years ago,
Speaker 1: for some reason do we know why, and we don't
Speaker 1: know why, it decided it didn't want to be that
Speaker 1: small anymore, that's right, Yeah, And that was the moment
Speaker 1: that space was created and then it expanded like crazy.
Speaker 1: It's something we call inflation. Inflation is not you know
Speaker 1: why your money doesn't work as well in every year?
Speaker 1: I mean that is inflation. But there's I don't know
Speaker 1: why do we do this? In science? We take an idea,
Speaker 1: a word that everybody uses to mean one thing, We
Speaker 1: just like use that same word to mean something totally different,
Speaker 1: but it fits when it describes it. In the universe
Speaker 1: inflated like a balloon, like a bubble, right, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: it's a good descriptive name from that sense. So the
Speaker 1: universe inflayed, that whole balloon inflated, and everything inside it
Speaker 1: got stretched. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy.
Speaker 1: It's like the universe expanded in space by a factor
Speaker 1: ten to the thirty. That's ten with thirty zeros on it,
Speaker 1: some crazy huge number, and it did it in this
Speaker 1: really small amount of time. Tend to the minus thirty.
Speaker 1: So that zero with thirty zeros after the decimal place,
Speaker 1: and then a one. So this incredible expansion, a huge
Speaker 1: expansion of space have tended the thirty in this tiny
Speaker 1: amount of time, tend to the minus thirty. It's hard
Speaker 1: to really even fathom. It was in a rush to
Speaker 1: get big yes, and it's still getting bigger today. And
Speaker 1: the other things that's important to understand is that space
Speaker 1: didn't get created like on the outside of the universe,
Speaker 1: like they made more room. It's stuff. The space inside
Speaker 1: the universe stretched and kind of created, so like between
Speaker 1: two particles you had a certain amount of space, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you had extra space between particles.
Speaker 1: So the more things, Yeah, everything is getting stretched out
Speaker 1: from the inside also not just from the outside, and
Speaker 1: that's also continuing to happen, like the expansion of the
Speaker 1: universe today. The in fact the universe is getting bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger is happening all around. This is more space
Speaker 1: being created. The third thing we should talk about today
Speaker 1: is uh that we don't know what happened before the
Speaker 1: Big Bang, like before this little bubble blew up, what
Speaker 1: happened before. But before we get into that, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. This is like totally territory for speculation
Speaker 1: and philosophy. Um, we have pretty good theories about what
Speaker 1: happened during the Big Bang. This idea of the inflation,
Speaker 1: we even have some experimental evidence for to back it up,
Speaker 1: and it's pretty solid theory these days that inflation happened.
Speaker 1: But what do you mean experimental? Like, we can't measure
Speaker 1: the Big Bang? Can we write? So we can't go
Speaker 1: back in time and see it right, Um, But we
Speaker 1: can do things like detectives do after a murder, and
Speaker 1: we can look for clues and say, are the clues
Speaker 1: that we've see in the universe today consistent with this
Speaker 1: story or with that other story. So we can sift
Speaker 1: through the clues from the Big Bang and say, it
Speaker 1: looks like the universe was created, and if inflation happened,
Speaker 1: it probably created these ripples in that plasma. We can
Speaker 1: see those ripples in the cosmic micro background radiation. It's
Speaker 1: really an incredible golden age of cosmology. They're doing all
Speaker 1: this really precision work to understand exactly what happened and
Speaker 1: what we know. So, but we can only see up
Speaker 1: to a certain points. We can only see before that
Speaker 1: is just the speculation. Before that, it's just speculation. So
Speaker 1: one popular idea is that there's this kind of matter
Speaker 1: called inflationary matter inflatons, and it has some weird gravitational properties,
Speaker 1: and those gravitational properties cause inflation, Like suddenly they came
Speaker 1: into being inside of this hot mess and it's like
Speaker 1: we need to get out of here. Yeah, it's this
Speaker 1: never ending loop of questions. Right, So you say, well,
Speaker 1: in the Big Bang was inflation? What caused inflation inflationary matter? Well,
Speaker 1: what created inflationary matter? It's like dot dot dot. You
Speaker 1: could just keep asking that question forever, and I think
Speaker 1: we will be asking that question forever, will always be
Speaker 1: pushing back and trying to understand, and until we get
Speaker 1: back to negative infinity and time, we're never going to
Speaker 1: have like a solid answer. But that's part of the fun, right,
Speaker 1: It's not like it's the journey as much as the destination.
Speaker 1: But there's some cool ideas there about what happened before
Speaker 1: that point, right, that's right. Yeah, Like maybe, um, the
Speaker 1: whole universe was filled with inflationary matter and in some
Speaker 1: places it decayed into normal matter and then inflation happened.
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, then you have like our
Speaker 1: universe is one spot inside some huge mega universe of
Speaker 1: inflationary matter, and maybe at other points in the in
Speaker 1: that mega universe there are also other dots that turned
Speaker 1: into what we call pocket universes, like it of the
Speaker 1: in the space of the of the mega universe, Mega
Speaker 1: zits on the mega universe and that maybe maybe like
Speaker 1: our universe is just like a little bubble in a
Speaker 1: big sea of other bubbles. That's right, exactly, that's one idea,
Speaker 1: and um, we have no way to really to test
Speaker 1: that idea is the problem because there's no way for
Speaker 1: us to ever reach those other bubbles. Because if that's
Speaker 1: the case, if that's really the reality of our, of
Speaker 1: our the situation of nature, it means that inflation is
Speaker 1: still happening because inflationary matter is still constantly expanding. So
Speaker 1: those other universes, those other bubbles are getting pushed away
Speaker 1: from us much much faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Because it's never like hang out. You can't send a
Speaker 1: message there, you can't ever see it, you can't ever
Speaker 1: go there. And scientifically that's a big problem. Um, not
Speaker 1: because I really want to go to the beaches and
Speaker 1: some other bubble universe, but because if you want to
Speaker 1: prove that it's true, you have to do an experiment,
Speaker 1: you have to find some evidence. You have to do
Speaker 1: you have to have a theory that can be confirmed.
Speaker 1: If if you have a theory that predicts something you
Speaker 1: can never test, and it's not really a scientific theory
Speaker 1: or a useful one. It's it's like, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: guess and uh, next one theory, maybe were a bubble
Speaker 1: in a sea of other universes. What's another idea for
Speaker 1: what happened before the Big Bang? Well, another idea is
Speaker 1: that maybe there's a cycle, right, maybe the Big Bang
Speaker 1: was caused by a big crunch, right. And to understand that,
Speaker 1: you have to think about sort of the future first, Like,
Speaker 1: so the Big Bang happened, every expands out, and then
Speaker 1: one question is like, are things going to keep expanding?
Speaker 1: We don't really know, but one possibilities they keep expanding
Speaker 1: forever in the universe just sort of drifts out into
Speaker 1: this endlessly cold, boring, bland situation. But another possibility is
Speaker 1: that it slows down, stops, and then falls back in.
Speaker 1: Everything rushes back and gravity pulls everything back into a
Speaker 1: to recreate a hot plate. Yeah, deflation, Well, I think
Speaker 1: you just invented. Can I go back and change it
Speaker 1: to my son's name oliveration. The deflation theory would say
Speaker 1: that the universe comes back, falls and then collapses back
Speaker 1: into a little hot mess again, a little hot mess.
Speaker 1: It's like recovering your youth, right, it's like a middle
Speaker 1: age crisis or whatever, and then it just bounces out again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that would be a cycle. So a big crunch,
Speaker 1: big bang, big crunch, big bang. That could be big
Speaker 1: bang US, big crunch, big bang again. Maybe somebody else,
Speaker 1: somebody else yeah, impossible, impossibly um Yeah. So that that's
Speaker 1: been Another idea is that what happened before is like
Speaker 1: more and more universes. Yeah. And there's something nice about
Speaker 1: that because it explains both that the our universe had
Speaker 1: a beginning and also gives you an explanation for what
Speaker 1: happened all the way back to the beginning of time
Speaker 1: because it returns to the possibility of the universe is
Speaker 1: infinitely old, right, because that could have been happening forever.
Speaker 1: It allows you to have this sort of finite length
Speaker 1: of time for our universe without limiting you to finiteness
Speaker 1: for the whole universe, sort of like this time could
Speaker 1: be infinite, but space could be finite. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the last crazy idea, which
Speaker 1: is maybe there was nothing before the Big Bang. I
Speaker 1: mean nothing, not even time. Right. We think space was
Speaker 1: created in the Big Bang, and spaces expanded and all
Speaker 1: that stuff, and so so there could have no time,
Speaker 1: no space before, no space and no time, right, And
Speaker 1: it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that is.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have a hard time imagining, like, what
Speaker 1: will happen after we die? Well, the universe continue without
Speaker 1: us right now, trying to imagine the universe without space
Speaker 1: and time? What does that even mean? And you have
Speaker 1: to think also about what time is itself? Like, what
Speaker 1: does it mean for there to not be time? Right,
Speaker 1: there's no time in which there's no time. There's no
Speaker 1: time for that to happen, right, um, And a lot
Speaker 1: of people think about time as sort of the organizing
Speaker 1: principle of the universe. Maybe you've heard of the second
Speaker 1: law of thermodynamics. It tells us that entropy is always
Speaker 1: increasing in the universe, and so they imagine things are
Speaker 1: getting messier, Things are getting messier inward, that's right, getting
Speaker 1: more and more spread out forward in time. And so
Speaker 1: some people think that that is time, that time is
Speaker 1: measured by entropy and created by entropy, and that before
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, if there was if there was nothing,
Speaker 1: no space, then there was no time. And that sounds
Speaker 1: like an odd idea, but in other ways, we're very
Speaker 1: familiar with it. Like you know, if you stand on
Speaker 1: the north pole and you asked which way is north, well,
Speaker 1: there is nothing north. You blew us up. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: write to Stephen Hawking and tell you, um, that's actually
Speaker 1: his his phrases. You know, maybe there's no north of
Speaker 1: north north. There's no before zero time. Yeah, because if
Speaker 1: you're standing on a sphere and you're the north pole
Speaker 1: of it, there's nowhere to go, no more northiness, there's
Speaker 1: no you can't the tape ends when you try to
Speaker 1: rewind it more. That's right, and that's something we're comfortable with.
Speaker 1: We're accepting the fact that a sphere has like a
Speaker 1: limit and edge, and it's reasonable for that there be
Speaker 1: nothing beyond it. But when we think of time, we
Speaker 1: tend to think of in a line, and so we
Speaker 1: want there to be something before it, or at least
Speaker 1: for there to be a reason why it started here
Speaker 1: and not somewhere else or some other other you know,
Speaker 1: time or um. It's a very natural, i think idea
Speaker 1: to have intuitively to think that something should have been
Speaker 1: before then. But it could be that there was nothing,
Speaker 1: that the things were created at that moment and there
Speaker 1: was nothing before there, and then we came, Yeah, we
Speaker 1: dropped the mic, we came, we made this podcast, and
Speaker 1: that's the summary of the whole universe in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: And you know, any of those theories. First of all,
Speaker 1: those are very difficult to test, and it's hard to
Speaker 1: imagine how we'll ever know. Right, it might be that
Speaker 1: there aren't any clues in the rubble of the universe
Speaker 1: to tell us which one is, which one is, which
Speaker 1: it might be, Although I'd like to have faith in
Speaker 1: future scientists coming up with clever ideas for ways to
Speaker 1: test these theories which right now seemed possible to test.
Speaker 1: But in the future people can be everybody able to
Speaker 1: see beyond the Big Bang. Yeah, maybe maybe they'll find
Speaker 1: some evidence in the current reubble that tells them it
Speaker 1: is this, or is that, or is the other thing?
Speaker 1: But even if you get there, imagine having an answer
Speaker 1: to one of these questions, Right, what do you think
Speaker 1: knowing what happened before the Big Bang would tell you like,
Speaker 1: how would how would it change your life? I think
Speaker 1: it would change everybody's life. I think it's a kind
Speaker 1: of knowledge that would filter into like the global consciousness.
Speaker 1: Think about how quantum mechanics has changed the way people
Speaker 1: think about things. But there's randomness in the universe, or
Speaker 1: the universe is not following a fixed set of rules,
Speaker 1: but that those rules have fuzz in them. You think
Speaker 1: it's It's changed the global consciousness way absolutely, and not
Speaker 1: just in New a g people who you know, but
Speaker 1: in everybody thinking about the universe is being a little
Speaker 1: different from what they imagined. Do you have a question
Speaker 1: you wish we would cover. We love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.