Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / What came before the Big Bang?

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What came before the Big Bang? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:04
Speaker 1: What if you thought, as an adult that you've been
0:06
Speaker 1: alive forever and then you discovered no, you actually had
0:09
Speaker 1: a childhood and you were born, and you would want
0:11
Speaker 1: to know all about that. It would be surprising. And
0:14
Speaker 1: actually that's sort of the situation science was it. For
0:17
Speaker 1: a long time astronomer thought the universe is fixed, it's constant.
0:22
Speaker 1: All the stars are just sort of hanging out there
0:24
Speaker 1: in space, not moving, and they've been like that forever. Hi,
0:38
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel, is this Horran? So? I'm a particle physicist.
0:42
Speaker 1: I smash protons together at certain in my day job
0:45
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what is the basic nature
0:47
Speaker 1: of matter? What do you smash as a hobby ban? Yeah?
0:49
Speaker 1: You know, when you're a particle physicist, you learned to
0:51
Speaker 1: solve problems by smashing stuff together. So whatever's around me,
0:55
Speaker 1: And I'm a cartoonist and my job is to sit
0:58
Speaker 1: in my pajamas all day and for funny things. That's
1:01
Speaker 1: not how you started, right. You didn't grow up thinking
1:03
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a cartoonist. No, I started off
1:05
Speaker 1: as a researcher. I'm an engineer. I studied robotics. I
1:08
Speaker 1: have a PhD in robotics. But um, somewhere along the line,
1:11
Speaker 1: I started joining comics and that kind of took off
1:15
Speaker 1: for me. And this is our podcast Daniel and Jorge
1:17
Speaker 1: explained the universe. Today, we're going to talk about how
1:22
Speaker 1: it all began. The biggest of questions, the Big Bang.
1:32
Speaker 1: What happened at the very beginning of the universe, What
1:36
Speaker 1: happened before the Big Bang? It's a pretty deep basic
1:39
Speaker 1: question about the origin of our universe. What do you
1:41
Speaker 1: think about it, what do you know about it? What
1:43
Speaker 1: do you imagine might have happened before the start of
1:46
Speaker 1: our universe. We went out and we asked people on
1:48
Speaker 1: the street what they thought happened just before the Big Bang. Um, well,
1:53
Speaker 1: there was a bunch of particles in the universe, and
1:55
Speaker 1: then they combined together and had all the energy of
2:02
Speaker 1: the universe. So then when it happened, that's how it
2:07
Speaker 1: was all dispersed. So most people seem to have some
2:10
Speaker 1: idea that, first of all, the Big Bang is more
2:12
Speaker 1: than just a TV show, right, that the idea for
2:15
Speaker 1: the science came before the TV show. I was kind
2:18
Speaker 1: of relieved to hear that everyone seems to know it's uh.
2:21
Speaker 1: It sort of marks the beginning of the universe. Right,
2:23
Speaker 1: it's a moment of creation or the starting of the
2:26
Speaker 1: clock of the universe, and everything came from. But what
2:29
Speaker 1: exactly happened during the Big Bang? And most interestingly, what
2:34
Speaker 1: happened before the Big Bang? Right? And that's that's fascinating
2:38
Speaker 1: to me. And these are the best questions, the ones
2:41
Speaker 1: that like try to answer the question where did everything
2:44
Speaker 1: come from? This sort of touches on the philosophical like
2:46
Speaker 1: why are we here? If you knew how the Big
2:49
Speaker 1: Bang happened and how the universe was created, you might
2:51
Speaker 1: get some insight into like what the purpose of life
2:53
Speaker 1: is or how to live your life or stuff. So
2:55
Speaker 1: to me, these are like really good, deep, basic questions.
3:03
Speaker 1: So we made a list of the four things we
3:05
Speaker 1: think you should know about the Big Band. The first
3:07
Speaker 1: one is that the entire universe was once really small.
3:14
Speaker 1: Maybe we think, let's talk about that. What do you
3:17
Speaker 1: mean maybe, Well, it's an interesting question. We know that
3:19
Speaker 1: the universe had a beginning, right, And how do we
3:21
Speaker 1: know that? We know that because things are expanding, things
3:23
Speaker 1: are moving away from each other. That was the major discovery,
3:26
Speaker 1: Like a hundred years ago, people looked out in the
3:28
Speaker 1: stars and discovered that they're all moving away from us. Okay,
3:31
Speaker 1: So like we thought everything would still like we were
3:34
Speaker 1: frozen in a gel or something. The stars were just
3:36
Speaker 1: like they're sitting there, generally speaking. But then they discovered
3:41
Speaker 1: that they actually things are moving away from each other,
3:43
Speaker 1: that's right, And everything is moving away from us, and
3:46
Speaker 1: everything is moving away from everything else. They just looked
3:48
Speaker 1: at stars, and you can measure how fast a star
3:50
Speaker 1: is moving relative to us by by seeing how it's
3:54
Speaker 1: light is stretched or shrunk, depending on whether it's moving
3:57
Speaker 1: away from us or towards the second dopler shift, like
4:00
Speaker 1: the highway patrol measuring your speed, you can sort of
4:03
Speaker 1: you can tell how fast you're going. Yeah, exactly. It's
4:06
Speaker 1: not like they looked at the stars and said, oh,
4:08
Speaker 1: now it's that once over there, it must have moved.
4:10
Speaker 1: It's like that's some other information, right, right, So they
4:12
Speaker 1: looked out there and they measured all this stuff, and
4:14
Speaker 1: they said, whoa, everything's stretching out and moving away from
4:17
Speaker 1: each other. So then the very natural consequences to say, well,
4:20
Speaker 1: run that backwards. What does that mean? It means things
4:23
Speaker 1: might have been smaller and more dense and maybe even
4:26
Speaker 1: come from a little spot like if you had the
4:28
Speaker 1: rewind bunt. If you see things maketting bigger, now, if
4:31
Speaker 1: you had the rewind bunt, wow for a while, what
4:34
Speaker 1: happens exactly? And those are the mental games people were playing.
4:37
Speaker 1: And actually the phrase big Bang was a joke that
4:40
Speaker 1: people made up to mock that idea. They're like, look,
4:42
Speaker 1: how ridiculous this idea is. It's kind of a silly
4:45
Speaker 1: sounding name, right, Yeah, it was like whimsical. It was.
4:47
Speaker 1: It was like a Donald Trump insult, you know, for
4:49
Speaker 1: somebody else's big Lee Bang. Yeah, the big Bang. Well,
4:54
Speaker 1: if you were like a respectable scientist today and you
4:57
Speaker 1: had to name this event, you wouldn't call it the
4:59
Speaker 1: big Bang? Or do you think that it was a
5:01
Speaker 1: good name? Oh man, if I was on a marketing committee,
5:05
Speaker 1: discover a new name for it, the moment of creation. Um, now,
5:10
Speaker 1: I think big Bang is actually pretty good. Yeah, you
5:13
Speaker 1: got your literation. It's short, it's pithy, you know, it's
5:16
Speaker 1: it's pretty well done. I think that's probably why it
5:18
Speaker 1: survived so long, because everyone wants the universe to start
5:21
Speaker 1: with the bank. That's right. So you played back the
5:26
Speaker 1: movie of the Universe, and it tells us that everything
5:30
Speaker 1: was once much closer together, and then much much closer,
5:33
Speaker 1: and then much much closer, and if you keep thinking
5:35
Speaker 1: about it, things may have been really really really close together.
5:40
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, they just keep extrapolating down to a point.
5:43
Speaker 1: And around the same time Einstein came up with all
5:46
Speaker 1: of his ideas of general relativity and thinking about gravity
5:48
Speaker 1: and how the universe works, and people were playing with
5:51
Speaker 1: those equations and discovering that those equations actually predicted that
5:54
Speaker 1: the universe could start from a point. They were consistent
5:57
Speaker 1: with Einstein's ideas of gravity. What you mean consider it
6:00
Speaker 1: was consistent, meaning that that it, um, you can construct
6:04
Speaker 1: a universe that starts from a point and then it
6:06
Speaker 1: blows up and expands, And that totally makes sense from
6:10
Speaker 1: an Einstein gravity point of view, like it follows the rules.
6:14
Speaker 1: It's allowed, meaning that nothing weird happens, like you can
6:19
Speaker 1: cram that much stuff into such as small space according
6:22
Speaker 1: to Einstein, right, which is pretty well accepted as a
6:27
Speaker 1: smart guy, he knows what he's talking about. But you know,
6:30
Speaker 1: there are some issues there. Um. The original idea was
6:33
Speaker 1: the Big Bang was this really dense hot blob of
6:36
Speaker 1: stuff and then it blew up and expanded into things
6:39
Speaker 1: we know, and you know, that was a weird idea
6:41
Speaker 1: for a long time, and people didn't believe it for
6:43
Speaker 1: a long time. It was in the sixties that they
6:45
Speaker 1: finally found the first like concrete piece of evidence that
6:49
Speaker 1: maybe the Big Bang had happened. And that's when they
6:52
Speaker 1: discovered the thing called the cosmic microwave background radiation. So
6:56
Speaker 1: it was weird to think about so much stuff and
6:59
Speaker 1: matter and stars and being cramped to small space. Yeah,
7:02
Speaker 1: because I meant the universe wasn't always this dark and
7:05
Speaker 1: cold and empty place that we know today. It was
7:08
Speaker 1: like a hot, dense blob like the center of the sun.
7:11
Speaker 1: It was a hot mess exactly. The universe was not
7:15
Speaker 1: well organized when it was young. Um. So yeah, so
7:19
Speaker 1: they said, okay, now, but now they saw something like
7:23
Speaker 1: you call it the cosmic microwave background radiation that said, yes,
7:27
Speaker 1: that's a clear indication things were a hot mess before. Yeah.
7:30
Speaker 1: They said, if things were really hot and dense a
7:33
Speaker 1: long time ago, then they should have given off this
7:35
Speaker 1: special kind of light and we should still be able
7:37
Speaker 1: to see it today. And they went out and they
7:39
Speaker 1: found it. You can see it like you can see
7:42
Speaker 1: it if you have a special radio telescope, and some
7:45
Speaker 1: guys built a fancy radio telescope. They weren't even actually
7:48
Speaker 1: looking for this background radiation and they just had a
7:51
Speaker 1: hiss in their in their telescope. They had this noise
7:54
Speaker 1: in their telescope. And coincidentally, some people a couple of
7:58
Speaker 1: years earlier had predicted, oh, if you build this kind
8:00
Speaker 1: of telescope, you'll and the big Bang happened. You'll hear
8:02
Speaker 1: this hiss and they turn on their telescope. They heard
8:04
Speaker 1: this hiss and they're like, what is this. We can't
8:06
Speaker 1: get rid of this noise. And then two years later
8:08
Speaker 1: the one the Nobel Prize. That's a great discovery. It
8:10
Speaker 1: was a pretty happy you're gonna get fired, but then
8:12
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, that mistake you made. It's the discovery
8:16
Speaker 1: of the universe. That's right. So that's a big bang.
8:19
Speaker 1: It's everything was once really small and then it's just
8:22
Speaker 1: gonna explode it out into what we have today. That's right.
8:26
Speaker 1: That's the whole idea, is that the universe has a
8:28
Speaker 1: beginning and then it expanded into what we know today. Um,
8:32
Speaker 1: And that was the sort of first idea of the
8:33
Speaker 1: big bang, like maybe everything came from a point, and people,
8:38
Speaker 1: a lot of people, when they think about the Big Bang,
8:39
Speaker 1: they think about the universe starting in a singularity, meaning
8:43
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff in zero volume, all of it
8:45
Speaker 1: on top of each other, in the same zero space exactly.
8:50
Speaker 1: And it's mind blowing to imagine, Like, take out the
8:53
Speaker 1: Sun and cram it down into the amount of space
8:56
Speaker 1: you have for a grain of sand. Hard to imagine,
8:58
Speaker 1: right now, make it even small. Now at every other
9:01
Speaker 1: star in the universe on top of it. It's like
9:04
Speaker 1: your brain in the same thing, right, Yeah, it's it's
9:09
Speaker 1: not really the same thing. It's just all the energy,
9:11
Speaker 1: all the all the energy density that we can have
9:14
Speaker 1: in the universe was cramed into that tiny little space.
9:17
Speaker 1: That was sort of the early idea. And you can
9:19
Speaker 1: imagine like a big empty universe of space with a
9:22
Speaker 1: tiny dot of matter in it, And of course that
9:26
Speaker 1: engenders a lot of questions like where did that tiny
9:28
Speaker 1: dot a matter come from? Right? Was there only one? Um?
9:32
Speaker 1: How was it created? Right? But before we keep going,
9:35
Speaker 1: let's take a short break. Well, so that's a big bang,
9:48
Speaker 1: and so the next thing people should know is that
9:50
Speaker 1: the Big Bang happened about fourteen billion years ago billion
9:54
Speaker 1: with a b billion years ago and I can't even
9:58
Speaker 1: remember what I did this morning fourteen minutes ago. That's
10:03
Speaker 1: how old universe is from that moment of the Big Bang. Yeah,
10:07
Speaker 1: so the universe has been around since the Big Bang
10:09
Speaker 1: about fourteen billion years and you know, for scale, the
10:12
Speaker 1: Earth has been around about four and a half billion years.
10:14
Speaker 1: That's when our solar system was formed. Well, how do
10:17
Speaker 1: you how do you how do we know how old
10:18
Speaker 1: the universe is? Like, yeah, like how can you tell? Yeah, well,
10:21
Speaker 1: we are seeing it expand and so the simplest way
10:24
Speaker 1: is to just extrapolate back, say how fast is it expanding?
10:27
Speaker 1: And extrapolate that expansion back until the zero point. So
10:31
Speaker 1: like if you look at it, the furthest stars you see,
10:34
Speaker 1: you know how fast we're going. You can just like
10:37
Speaker 1: hit the rewind button. It would take about fourteen billion
10:41
Speaker 1: years for it to connect to everything else. Yeah, so
10:45
Speaker 1: we're pretty sure that something happened fourteen billion years ago.
10:48
Speaker 1: This expansion of space happened fourteen billion years ago. But
10:51
Speaker 1: these days scientists are a little fuzzier on what exactly
10:54
Speaker 1: the Big Bang was. So idea zero was a tiny
10:58
Speaker 1: dot with all the matter and explodes into the universe um.
11:02
Speaker 1: Problems with this idea are one that you can't really
11:06
Speaker 1: have tiny dots of infinite density, so Einstein told me
11:09
Speaker 1: before you could. Well, that was Einstein's idea, and the
11:12
Speaker 1: idea is consistent with Einstein's gravity, but Einstein's theories of
11:16
Speaker 1: gravity don't account for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics something that
11:20
Speaker 1: came after Einstein he was never really very comfortable with,
11:23
Speaker 1: and quantum mechanics is a whole, big, long story. But
11:26
Speaker 1: the thing we need to understand is that it says
11:28
Speaker 1: you can't have things that are super duper tiny. There
11:31
Speaker 1: might be the smallest space, there might be the smallest distance. Yeah,
11:36
Speaker 1: like at some point you can't get unfuzzier. That's right, exactly,
11:39
Speaker 1: it's a basic unit of fuzziness. Like imagine space being pixelated, right,
11:43
Speaker 1: Like you can't talk about something smaller than one pixel.
11:47
Speaker 1: So we think that quantum mechanics is probably correct. And
11:51
Speaker 1: if the big pixel, that's right, the first pixel in
11:54
Speaker 1: the universe. So we think if you try to follow
11:57
Speaker 1: Einstein extrapolate the universe down to point general relativity probably works,
12:02
Speaker 1: but we think it probably breaks when you get down
12:05
Speaker 1: to really really tiny distances and really heavy stuff. But
12:09
Speaker 1: nobody's ever seen that happen. You have to look inside
12:11
Speaker 1: a black hole or go back in time and see
12:13
Speaker 1: the Big Bang. But these days we have a slightly
12:16
Speaker 1: fuzzier version of the idea of the Big Bang. Rather
12:18
Speaker 1: then a point of matter that then explodes into space,
12:22
Speaker 1: we think of the universe is being created as a
12:24
Speaker 1: blob of space and matter and then and matter. Yeah,
12:29
Speaker 1: so like it was, it's a like a blob of space,
12:32
Speaker 1: like a tiny universe with not much space. So instead
12:36
Speaker 1: of an infinite universe with a tiny blob of matter
12:38
Speaker 1: in it, now imagine a tiny piece of space filled
12:41
Speaker 1: with energy and matter. Okay, and what's outside of that
12:44
Speaker 1: little space we have no idea, Like seriously, we can't
12:47
Speaker 1: even imagine inconceivable, right, But we do know that space
12:51
Speaker 1: can be variable in size, space can expand, and these
12:55
Speaker 1: days we have a more modern idea of the Big
12:57
Speaker 1: Bang as that expansion of that space kind of like
13:00
Speaker 1: a bubble, Like a bubble that's a space, and then
13:03
Speaker 1: there's stuff in the bubble. So you're saying both those
13:06
Speaker 1: things blew up exactly. And this is the more modern
13:10
Speaker 1: idea that space itself can expand. And so if you're
13:13
Speaker 1: out there thinking, what is he talking about? How can
13:15
Speaker 1: space expand? What is it expanding into? Everything has to
13:18
Speaker 1: be in something, right, And the answer is, we don't know.
13:22
Speaker 1: We think used to think of space is just like emptiness,
13:25
Speaker 1: and we can go a whole episode about just what
13:27
Speaker 1: spaces and I think we really will, so keep listening.
13:30
Speaker 1: But these days we think of space as a thing
13:32
Speaker 1: because it can expand, it can bend, and it can ripple,
13:35
Speaker 1: so we know it has all these properties. So it
13:37
Speaker 1: might be that this bubble of space in the early
13:40
Speaker 1: universe was in some sort of super meta deep space
13:43
Speaker 1: that we have never really discovered, or nothing. It could
13:46
Speaker 1: be that it doesn't have to hang in something else.
13:49
Speaker 1: It's just the edge. And space itself was smaller that
13:52
Speaker 1: that much. We know space was small. Space was smaller,
13:55
Speaker 1: and the stuff in it was crammed in really really
13:59
Speaker 1: small to try it. And then about fourteen billion years ago,
14:02
Speaker 1: for some reason do we know why, and we don't
14:04
Speaker 1: know why, it decided it didn't want to be that
14:06
Speaker 1: small anymore, that's right, Yeah, And that was the moment
14:09
Speaker 1: that space was created and then it expanded like crazy.
14:12
Speaker 1: It's something we call inflation. Inflation is not you know
14:16
Speaker 1: why your money doesn't work as well in every year?
14:19
Speaker 1: I mean that is inflation. But there's I don't know
14:22
Speaker 1: why do we do this? In science? We take an idea,
14:24
Speaker 1: a word that everybody uses to mean one thing, We
14:27
Speaker 1: just like use that same word to mean something totally different,
14:30
Speaker 1: but it fits when it describes it. In the universe
14:34
Speaker 1: inflated like a balloon, like a bubble, right, yes, okay,
14:36
Speaker 1: it's a good descriptive name from that sense. So the
14:39
Speaker 1: universe inflayed, that whole balloon inflated, and everything inside it
14:42
Speaker 1: got stretched. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy.
14:45
Speaker 1: It's like the universe expanded in space by a factor
14:49
Speaker 1: ten to the thirty. That's ten with thirty zeros on it,
14:53
Speaker 1: some crazy huge number, and it did it in this
14:56
Speaker 1: really small amount of time. Tend to the minus thirty.
14:59
Speaker 1: So that zero with thirty zeros after the decimal place,
15:03
Speaker 1: and then a one. So this incredible expansion, a huge
15:06
Speaker 1: expansion of space have tended the thirty in this tiny
15:09
Speaker 1: amount of time, tend to the minus thirty. It's hard
15:11
Speaker 1: to really even fathom. It was in a rush to
15:13
Speaker 1: get big yes, and it's still getting bigger today. And
15:17
Speaker 1: the other things that's important to understand is that space
15:19
Speaker 1: didn't get created like on the outside of the universe,
15:22
Speaker 1: like they made more room. It's stuff. The space inside
15:26
Speaker 1: the universe stretched and kind of created, so like between
15:29
Speaker 1: two particles you had a certain amount of space, and
15:31
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you had extra space between particles.
15:34
Speaker 1: So the more things, Yeah, everything is getting stretched out
15:38
Speaker 1: from the inside also not just from the outside, and
15:40
Speaker 1: that's also continuing to happen, like the expansion of the
15:43
Speaker 1: universe today. The in fact the universe is getting bigger
15:45
Speaker 1: and bigger is happening all around. This is more space
15:48
Speaker 1: being created. The third thing we should talk about today
15:52
Speaker 1: is uh that we don't know what happened before the
15:55
Speaker 1: Big Bang, like before this little bubble blew up, what
15:59
Speaker 1: happened before. But before we get into that, let's take
16:02
Speaker 1: a quick break. This is like totally territory for speculation
16:17
Speaker 1: and philosophy. Um, we have pretty good theories about what
16:20
Speaker 1: happened during the Big Bang. This idea of the inflation,
16:23
Speaker 1: we even have some experimental evidence for to back it up,
16:27
Speaker 1: and it's pretty solid theory these days that inflation happened.
16:29
Speaker 1: But what do you mean experimental? Like, we can't measure
16:31
Speaker 1: the Big Bang? Can we write? So we can't go
16:34
Speaker 1: back in time and see it right, Um, But we
16:36
Speaker 1: can do things like detectives do after a murder, and
16:38
Speaker 1: we can look for clues and say, are the clues
16:41
Speaker 1: that we've see in the universe today consistent with this
16:43
Speaker 1: story or with that other story. So we can sift
16:46
Speaker 1: through the clues from the Big Bang and say, it
16:48
Speaker 1: looks like the universe was created, and if inflation happened,
16:51
Speaker 1: it probably created these ripples in that plasma. We can
16:54
Speaker 1: see those ripples in the cosmic micro background radiation. It's
16:57
Speaker 1: really an incredible golden age of cosmology. They're doing all
17:00
Speaker 1: this really precision work to understand exactly what happened and
17:04
Speaker 1: what we know. So, but we can only see up
17:06
Speaker 1: to a certain points. We can only see before that
17:08
Speaker 1: is just the speculation. Before that, it's just speculation. So
17:11
Speaker 1: one popular idea is that there's this kind of matter
17:14
Speaker 1: called inflationary matter inflatons, and it has some weird gravitational properties,
17:20
Speaker 1: and those gravitational properties cause inflation, Like suddenly they came
17:24
Speaker 1: into being inside of this hot mess and it's like
17:28
Speaker 1: we need to get out of here. Yeah, it's this
17:30
Speaker 1: never ending loop of questions. Right, So you say, well,
17:33
Speaker 1: in the Big Bang was inflation? What caused inflation inflationary matter? Well,
17:36
Speaker 1: what created inflationary matter? It's like dot dot dot. You
17:40
Speaker 1: could just keep asking that question forever, and I think
17:43
Speaker 1: we will be asking that question forever, will always be
17:45
Speaker 1: pushing back and trying to understand, and until we get
17:48
Speaker 1: back to negative infinity and time, we're never going to
17:50
Speaker 1: have like a solid answer. But that's part of the fun, right,
17:53
Speaker 1: It's not like it's the journey as much as the destination.
17:56
Speaker 1: But there's some cool ideas there about what happened before
17:59
Speaker 1: that point, right, that's right. Yeah, Like maybe, um, the
18:02
Speaker 1: whole universe was filled with inflationary matter and in some
18:06
Speaker 1: places it decayed into normal matter and then inflation happened.
18:11
Speaker 1: And if that's the case, then you have like our
18:13
Speaker 1: universe is one spot inside some huge mega universe of
18:17
Speaker 1: inflationary matter, and maybe at other points in the in
18:22
Speaker 1: that mega universe there are also other dots that turned
18:26
Speaker 1: into what we call pocket universes, like it of the
18:30
Speaker 1: in the space of the of the mega universe, Mega
18:32
Speaker 1: zits on the mega universe and that maybe maybe like
18:37
Speaker 1: our universe is just like a little bubble in a
18:39
Speaker 1: big sea of other bubbles. That's right, exactly, that's one idea,
18:43
Speaker 1: and um, we have no way to really to test
18:45
Speaker 1: that idea is the problem because there's no way for
18:49
Speaker 1: us to ever reach those other bubbles. Because if that's
18:52
Speaker 1: the case, if that's really the reality of our, of
18:55
Speaker 1: our the situation of nature, it means that inflation is
18:58
Speaker 1: still happening because inflationary matter is still constantly expanding. So
19:03
Speaker 1: those other universes, those other bubbles are getting pushed away
19:06
Speaker 1: from us much much faster than the speed of light.
19:08
Speaker 1: Because it's never like hang out. You can't send a
19:12
Speaker 1: message there, you can't ever see it, you can't ever
19:14
Speaker 1: go there. And scientifically that's a big problem. Um, not
19:17
Speaker 1: because I really want to go to the beaches and
19:19
Speaker 1: some other bubble universe, but because if you want to
19:22
Speaker 1: prove that it's true, you have to do an experiment,
19:25
Speaker 1: you have to find some evidence. You have to do
19:27
Speaker 1: you have to have a theory that can be confirmed.
19:29
Speaker 1: If if you have a theory that predicts something you
19:32
Speaker 1: can never test, and it's not really a scientific theory
19:35
Speaker 1: or a useful one. It's it's like, yeah, it's a
19:39
Speaker 1: guess and uh, next one theory, maybe were a bubble
19:42
Speaker 1: in a sea of other universes. What's another idea for
19:45
Speaker 1: what happened before the Big Bang? Well, another idea is
19:48
Speaker 1: that maybe there's a cycle, right, maybe the Big Bang
19:52
Speaker 1: was caused by a big crunch, right. And to understand that,
19:56
Speaker 1: you have to think about sort of the future first, Like,
19:58
Speaker 1: so the Big Bang happened, every expands out, and then
20:02
Speaker 1: one question is like, are things going to keep expanding?
20:05
Speaker 1: We don't really know, but one possibilities they keep expanding
20:08
Speaker 1: forever in the universe just sort of drifts out into
20:10
Speaker 1: this endlessly cold, boring, bland situation. But another possibility is
20:16
Speaker 1: that it slows down, stops, and then falls back in.
20:20
Speaker 1: Everything rushes back and gravity pulls everything back into a
20:24
Speaker 1: to recreate a hot plate. Yeah, deflation, Well, I think
20:28
Speaker 1: you just invented. Can I go back and change it
20:31
Speaker 1: to my son's name oliveration. The deflation theory would say
20:39
Speaker 1: that the universe comes back, falls and then collapses back
20:42
Speaker 1: into a little hot mess again, a little hot mess.
20:45
Speaker 1: It's like recovering your youth, right, it's like a middle
20:47
Speaker 1: age crisis or whatever, and then it just bounces out again. Yeah,
20:51
Speaker 1: and that would be a cycle. So a big crunch,
20:53
Speaker 1: big bang, big crunch, big bang. That could be big
20:56
Speaker 1: bang US, big crunch, big bang again. Maybe somebody else,
21:00
Speaker 1: somebody else yeah, impossible, impossibly um Yeah. So that that's
21:07
Speaker 1: been Another idea is that what happened before is like
21:10
Speaker 1: more and more universes. Yeah. And there's something nice about
21:13
Speaker 1: that because it explains both that the our universe had
21:17
Speaker 1: a beginning and also gives you an explanation for what
21:20
Speaker 1: happened all the way back to the beginning of time
21:22
Speaker 1: because it returns to the possibility of the universe is
21:25
Speaker 1: infinitely old, right, because that could have been happening forever.
21:28
Speaker 1: It allows you to have this sort of finite length
21:31
Speaker 1: of time for our universe without limiting you to finiteness
21:34
Speaker 1: for the whole universe, sort of like this time could
21:38
Speaker 1: be infinite, but space could be finite. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
21:43
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the last crazy idea, which
21:46
Speaker 1: is maybe there was nothing before the Big Bang. I
21:50
Speaker 1: mean nothing, not even time. Right. We think space was
21:54
Speaker 1: created in the Big Bang, and spaces expanded and all
21:57
Speaker 1: that stuff, and so so there could have no time,
22:00
Speaker 1: no space before, no space and no time, right, And
22:04
Speaker 1: it's hard to even wrap your mind around what that is.
22:06
Speaker 1: I mean, we have a hard time imagining, like, what
22:09
Speaker 1: will happen after we die? Well, the universe continue without
22:11
Speaker 1: us right now, trying to imagine the universe without space
22:14
Speaker 1: and time? What does that even mean? And you have
22:17
Speaker 1: to think also about what time is itself? Like, what
22:19
Speaker 1: does it mean for there to not be time? Right,
22:22
Speaker 1: there's no time in which there's no time. There's no
22:24
Speaker 1: time for that to happen, right, um, And a lot
22:27
Speaker 1: of people think about time as sort of the organizing
22:31
Speaker 1: principle of the universe. Maybe you've heard of the second
22:33
Speaker 1: law of thermodynamics. It tells us that entropy is always
22:36
Speaker 1: increasing in the universe, and so they imagine things are
22:39
Speaker 1: getting messier, Things are getting messier inward, that's right, getting
22:43
Speaker 1: more and more spread out forward in time. And so
22:46
Speaker 1: some people think that that is time, that time is
22:49
Speaker 1: measured by entropy and created by entropy, and that before
22:52
Speaker 1: the Big Bang, if there was if there was nothing,
22:55
Speaker 1: no space, then there was no time. And that sounds
22:59
Speaker 1: like an odd idea, but in other ways, we're very
23:01
Speaker 1: familiar with it. Like you know, if you stand on
23:04
Speaker 1: the north pole and you asked which way is north, well,
23:07
Speaker 1: there is nothing north. You blew us up. I'm gonna
23:15
Speaker 1: write to Stephen Hawking and tell you, um, that's actually
23:19
Speaker 1: his his phrases. You know, maybe there's no north of
23:21
Speaker 1: north north. There's no before zero time. Yeah, because if
23:25
Speaker 1: you're standing on a sphere and you're the north pole
23:28
Speaker 1: of it, there's nowhere to go, no more northiness, there's
23:32
Speaker 1: no you can't the tape ends when you try to
23:35
Speaker 1: rewind it more. That's right, and that's something we're comfortable with.
23:37
Speaker 1: We're accepting the fact that a sphere has like a
23:39
Speaker 1: limit and edge, and it's reasonable for that there be
23:43
Speaker 1: nothing beyond it. But when we think of time, we
23:45
Speaker 1: tend to think of in a line, and so we
23:47
Speaker 1: want there to be something before it, or at least
23:49
Speaker 1: for there to be a reason why it started here
23:52
Speaker 1: and not somewhere else or some other other you know,
23:54
Speaker 1: time or um. It's a very natural, i think idea
23:58
Speaker 1: to have intuitively to think that something should have been
24:01
Speaker 1: before then. But it could be that there was nothing,
24:04
Speaker 1: that the things were created at that moment and there
24:06
Speaker 1: was nothing before there, and then we came, Yeah, we
24:09
Speaker 1: dropped the mic, we came, we made this podcast, and
24:13
Speaker 1: that's the summary of the whole universe in a nutshell.
24:18
Speaker 1: And you know, any of those theories. First of all,
24:20
Speaker 1: those are very difficult to test, and it's hard to
24:23
Speaker 1: imagine how we'll ever know. Right, it might be that
24:26
Speaker 1: there aren't any clues in the rubble of the universe
24:30
Speaker 1: to tell us which one is, which one is, which
24:32
Speaker 1: it might be, Although I'd like to have faith in
24:35
Speaker 1: future scientists coming up with clever ideas for ways to
24:38
Speaker 1: test these theories which right now seemed possible to test.
24:41
Speaker 1: But in the future people can be everybody able to
24:44
Speaker 1: see beyond the Big Bang. Yeah, maybe maybe they'll find
24:48
Speaker 1: some evidence in the current reubble that tells them it
24:51
Speaker 1: is this, or is that, or is the other thing?
24:53
Speaker 1: But even if you get there, imagine having an answer
24:55
Speaker 1: to one of these questions, Right, what do you think
24:58
Speaker 1: knowing what happened before the Big Bang would tell you like,
25:00
Speaker 1: how would how would it change your life? I think
25:03
Speaker 1: it would change everybody's life. I think it's a kind
25:05
Speaker 1: of knowledge that would filter into like the global consciousness.
25:10
Speaker 1: Think about how quantum mechanics has changed the way people
25:12
Speaker 1: think about things. But there's randomness in the universe, or
25:16
Speaker 1: the universe is not following a fixed set of rules,
25:19
Speaker 1: but that those rules have fuzz in them. You think
25:21
Speaker 1: it's It's changed the global consciousness way absolutely, and not
25:25
Speaker 1: just in New a g people who you know, but
25:28
Speaker 1: in everybody thinking about the universe is being a little
25:31
Speaker 1: different from what they imagined. Do you have a question
25:39
Speaker 1: you wish we would cover. We love to hear from you.
25:41
Speaker 1: You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at
25:44
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at
25:47
Speaker 1: Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.