The Maths Thread

[2smokinberyls smockfrocks]

I’ll set you a wine drinking question, how did the universe start, or to put it another way what was there before there was nothing and did nothing ever exist?

that's easy, i wrote an essay on it as a student when i thought i wanted to be a theoretical physicist for a living.
i'll summarise...

you know how a single cell can divide into two as if by magic?
one moment there is one cell, the next there are two cells.
well, imagine if you were small enough to live inside the second cell.
you'd have no idea where it came from.
you'd think it had come from nothing.
you wouldn't know that there were other cells/universes beyond your own.

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

I’ll set you a wine drinking question, how did the universe start, or to put it another way what was there before there was nothing and did nothing ever exist?

Kind of a “what’s north of the North Pole?” type of question.

The answer sits outside of the inception of our physical laws. If you go back to the singularity that started the Big Bang, t=0, time itself ceases to exist, along with all other physical dimensions.

The idea of something happening “before” something else necessarily requires a time dimension for it to make any sense.

A long-winded way of saying it is both unknowable and also that the answer defies the very question itself.

 

[hammocity]

that's easy, i wrote an essay on it as a student when i thought i wanted to be a theoretical physicist for a living.
i'll summarise...

you know how a single cell can divide into two as if by magic?
one moment there is one cell, the next there are two cells.
well, imagine if you were small enough to live inside the second cell.
you'd have no idea where it came from.
you'd think it had come from nothing.
you wouldn't know that there were other cells/universes beyond your own.

Yeah, but where did that cell come from in the first instance, what was there before there was nothing?

 

[2smokinberyls smockfrocks]

Yeah, but where did that cell come from in the first instance, what was there before there was nothing?

dictum!

as parmenides said...
οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός

some roman or other later turned that into...
ex nihilo nihil fit

there are folk who argue that time is simply nature's way of making everything seem as if it is not all happening at once.

who knows.

 

[2smokinberyls smockfrocks]

edit, sorry hammocity if you thought i was calling you a dictum.
i wasn't.

 

[2smokinberyls smockfrocks]

Kind of a “what’s north of the North Pole?” type of question.

The answer sits outside of the inception of our physical laws. If you go back to the singularity that started the Big Bang, t=0, time itself ceases to exist, along with all other physical dimensions.

The idea of something happening “before” something else necessarily requires a time dimension for it to make any sense.

A long-winded way of saying it is both unknowable and also that the answer defies the very question itself.

to be clear, before i discuss your post if i may,
and this is not about the dead babies wine thang so i hope we can be in on this one rather than out
(please don't hate me and put me on ignore, fluxy)...

do you personally think that the unproven theory called the big bang is actually what happened?

 

[SkyBlueFlux]

to be clear, before i discuss your post if i may,
and this is not about the dead babies wine thang so i hope we can be in on this one rather than out
(please don't hate me and put me on ignore, fluxy)...

do you personally think that the unproven theory called the big bang is actually what happened?

I don’t put people on ignore just for being a bit weird, so you’re safe for now…

Well, it’s quite a provocative question to ask somebody with a physics degree. The evidence for the Big Bang Theory is substantial (indeed in science you can be sure that anything that has made the grade of being called a Theory has a lot of good evidence behind it, far from being unproven). I’ve observed a lot of that evidence directly myself.

Science generally ascribes to the model that best fits the data, until an optimised model comes along which fits it better.

There is only really one conclusion you can draw from the existence of cosmic background microwave radiation, Galaxy redshift and the difference in elemental constituents of far away galaxies. The universe simply must have at some point in time been much much smaller and more primitive. We know the universe is not steady state, we know there is leftover radiation from a rapid expansion event.

It’s like looking at the shockwave from a bomb. We don’t need to have seen the initial explosion to figure out that one must have happened by the way everything around it behaves.

Does that mean that is all there is to it? A singularity expanded and here we are? Probably not, there’s all kinds of unanswered questions about things like dark matter and dark energy which I’ll leave to the real scientists. But the Big Bang is the only theory for the origin of the universe that neatly fits all of our available evidence.

 

[Paladin]

This made me laugh earlier. It also made me buy the Private Eye Annual 2023.

 

[Paladin]

The GCHQ quiz was released today. It took me from 9am to 16:30pm, on and off, but completed it.

 

[Summerbuzz]

I've just been at that in the coffee shop after doing my supermarket shop.

Got 1,2, 6 & 7. Confident I can get 4.

5 is the one doing my strudel. First line is easy. The rest.... uhhhh.

FWIW, the last one is supposed to be solved using the picture included in the two page "Christmas Card" layout.

I've included it here (not perfect quality but readable and a small file).



The original is a 6mb PDF available on the GCHQ site, here.