Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang | Hacker News Reader

Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

quantamagazine.org

54 pointsbookofjoe22 comments

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/JHEP10(2023)18...

Attempt, but at least so far seem to be on the side of "nope, we probably won't be able to."

If a mathematician can determine the square root of -1, I have faith they’ll be able to “see” “prior” to the Big Bang.

They didn't actually determine it. The cheated by giving it a single letter variable name, and ran with it. It's the mathematical equivalent of buying using a rubber check that is never cashed, so everything is OK.

Isn't I a glyph in the same way that 1 is a glyph?

Yes, checks are money. But they still feel different from cash.

well, because they are not technically money because the check could be bad; you have no way to verify if it would bounce.

I mean, you can have faith in whatever you want, but if you read to the end of the article the mathematicians themselves are the ones saying the conditions seem more to agree with the scenario where they won't.

If the Big Bang happened.

"Big Bang" is an evocative name of a theory that matches observation to a high accuracy

The problem with "evocative" names is that they may evoke things that are not in the theory.

For example, the big bang wasn't an explosion in the common sense of the word. The theory also doesn't imply that the big bang was the beginning of the universe.

I was being lazy. I think I was just wondering how much the new observations from our new space telescope are really making the big bang untenable...re very early universe already having galaxies, etc... But its not my field, but I was getting the impression that the challenges are mounting up. Also, the problem with observatory science, is that multiple hypotheses can fit the data.

I have no mathematical justification for this

However, my intuition and direct perception of my reality, makes me think of the universe more like a big (potentially never ending) cycle

I don’t think there is a beginning (probably no end either)

Was the chicken or egg first? To me that doesn’t make sense. They both need each other, there is no first, there is just both in an alternating cycle

Kind of like everything… at least that I can observe, from my own subjective point of view

As I understand it, the big bang is not a moment where everything started and time just went from not existing to existing as we know it now. Instead, it’s more like a singularity, where the ideas of “beginning” doesn’t even make sense, in the way that 1/sin(x) has a discontinuity that you really wouldn’t call “the beginning of sine”.

That is a great observation

I can think of states of cycles “mediated” (or alternated), by “unknowns”

For example, if I have a cycle that produces 1,0,1,0,1,0… I could say there is an unknown between 0 and 1 that flips between the two, but it’s something different than 0 or 1 (like an operation/action)

To me, it seems like the universe is an “unknowably” large/complex fractal of recursive cycles

Or in other words, turtles all the way down

Actually, it’s more like superimposed (rather than recursive or going in any direction)

Recursion needs to have a base case to terminate. But the basic cycle of the universe doesn’t seem to terminate (although it’s also technically unknowable for my limited finite perception in time, which it seems certain will terminate at some point)

I'm more surprised you don't take a more quantum mechanical view of the problem. At vanishingly small scales, we know particles can come into existence provided they leave existence quickly enough to not effect the overall energy balance - but they're quite real, they mediate how forces in our universe operate, and have measurable parameters.

It does not seem inconceivable that all of space-time could be a similar sort of event: an bubble of higher-rules coming into existence spontaneously, and necessarily structured to not violate the rules of whichever higher-level system governs it (moreover: this could just be quantum mechanics, the same rules as us, operating at a large scale).

Which then gets to the interesting stuff: Poincare recurrence[1]. Dynamical systems after long but non-infinite times return to existing states - aka if the universe were regarded in such a way, then there is large but not infinite amount of time before it will return to either the "big bang" start state, or on an even longer timescale, any actual moment in time that ever happens.

Which is somewhat solipsistic of course, because it's all infinities anyway: an exact version of your atoms re-existing at multiple distantly separated points in time would be a multi-verse of sorts, just across another dimension: and of course if it's the same atoms, doing deterministically the same things, then it's essentially the same consciousness - so all those spaced repetitions of events aren't meaningfully distinct, so they're kind of the same...except they're also infinite, because they can just keep recurring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theor...

I think everything is, at least conceptually, quantum. Only that our perception range “matches” our macro world so that things look mostly like solid objects, but they are all actually superpositions that I’m “sampling” through my perception

> because it's all infinities anyway: an exact version of your atoms re-existing at multiple distantly separated points in time would be a multi-verse of sorts

This is truly fascinating, I hadn’t heard of this. I interpret it as “aliasing”. So even though aliasing is usually defined in terms of the limit of the resolution of a signal processing system. You could say it also applies to our perception of the universe. At some point we hit our sampling rate limit and so anything we perceive could also be the alias of something at a different frequency that we can’t perceive

Kind of how we do with ultraviolet light. We can’t directly see it, so then we add an additional color. Or how we alias infrared or x-ray for astrophotography

And this is also how neural networks work: they convert everything to embedding vectors of a certain (finite) size, so then all information is essentially being mapped to a limited number of meanings, whose combinations (superposition?) determine the overall meaning of something

I think it’s worth pointing out that there are two “big bang”s. There’s the supposed singularity, which is what it seems we’re talking about here. And there’s the expansion that immediately follows the singularity. We have good evidence for the latter, and the former is on much shakier ground than is widely understood.

That’s cool. Could it be possible that the expansion that immediately follows the singularity is not necessarily pointing to a very distant past space time, but rather to a recurrent cyclical process that is currently happening for everything around us?

Essentially, is there time-aliasing* in our measurements? And if so, does that point to cyclical processes and thus uncertainty about any potential absolute age of the universe? ie. If the universe behaves in a cycle, we might not be able to tell what number of cycle we are in, but maybe only our current stage/progress along the overall cycle

* the “double slit in time” experiment seems to show that https://youtu.be/b9O6iCM4vCg?feature=shared

Another user in another post quoted the hero of an 1000 faces writer (campbell) to which your institution reduces:

All religion and creation myths boil down to 1 of the following:

- something made it

- it's always been here

- it's alive and we can interact with it

Cool, so it seems like a rather universal core intuition of human consciousness :)

It also makes sense thinking about our own creation:

- we were made by our parents (and our experience in the world)

- our matter/energy has always been here (or so it seems)

- we feel alive and can interact with our environment and other things seemingly alive or not (rocks, etc)

Btw, if we are alive and made up of matter that was already here, what separates us from non-living things?

The egg. The parents was very chicken like though.

Yes. Always assume this weird big bang theory from a catholic priest is an attempt to reconcile scientific cosmology with the Christian creation dogma.

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