Ask A Genius 826: Does the Big Bang have Issues?
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/03/31
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: A few days ago I sent you an article on 10 things that are wrong with the current version of the Big Bang like observations that don’t match the theory because the Big Bang, in general terms, was laid out about 60 years ago or a little more maybe. Everything started from a single point and just exploded outward, space and everything but it’s been refined to account for the conditions of the universe now. It’s really hard to get the initial conditions to be such that they would create the universe we live in now. So this article listed eight problems with the Big Bang and almost all of them, maybe all of them are with the beginning of the universe. They can’t get conditions right and I haven’t read this article yet somebody sent me an article today saying that here’s a theory that says that there was the Big Bang and then a month later there was a second Big Bang but just for dark matter. So, all this stuff is a little bit ad hoc and just trying to get it to fit.
I got to say that if the beginning of the universe isn’t just the beginning of the universe. If the universe has had time before the apparent age of the universe, then I’m pretty sure you can solve most or all of these problems; issues with entropy, the distribution of matter, and the clump-iness of matter. But if the universe has had, compared to the relatively a brief apparent age of the universe, if it’s had a gazillion times that amount of time to arrange itself, then all those issues go away. That’s all I got to say pretty much. One more thing; one reason people love the Big Bang, I mean there are a lot of reasons, that it’s very conceptually simple. Even though it doesn’t explain why, at first glance it explains how. Everything exploded outward and then it clumped up and formed galaxies and stars but another slightly more sophisticated reason people love the Big Bang is that it has the universe being the same every place which is one of those principles of physics that are cherished by people who do physics. The regularity, you don’t want to make special rules for just the place you’re at. Physics is about finding general principles that account for everything and saying “It’s like this right where you’re standing but it’s different every place else,” strikes people as unhelpful and bullshit. But the Big Bang has the universe every place at the same time. You don’t see the whole universe at the same time because you’re looking further back in time the further back you look.
Assuming that every place of the universe is at the same time, it just takes a while for that stuff to catch up to us the universe is the same throughout all space. It’s built on the assumption that if you could see the whole universe instantaneously, every part of the universe would basically look the same; the same kind of galaxies and the same spatial distribution of galaxies, it would be uniform in space. There would be no point in space that’s really much different than any other point. Yeah, one point might be in a galaxy and some other point might be outside of galaxies but it’s like a pattern in the books you always see, just a bunch of dots on a balloon and the surface of the balloon is the universe and those dots are regularly spaced and people love that. But the Big Bang universe is not the same in time. There are no points in time that are the same because the universe is always expanding.
And before the Big Bang one, there were two competing theories steady-state theory and Big Bang Theory and then there were a bunch of discoveries made which confirmed Big Bang Theory knocks steady-state straight out of the water. Steady-state had the lovely things of being uniform in space and in time. Steady-state theory said that whenever you had a part of space that just got too empty, that was too far away from um other matter, then maybe new matter just popped into existence. So every place you weren’t and every place you weren’t looking, new matter came along. So as the universe expanded, the new galaxies would form to fill those empty spaces and there was no evidence of that happening. So steady-state theory lost.
Informational cosmology has the nice thing, if you’d like things being the same, it has the universe being roughly the same across time and it accounts for differences in the universe across space and time because it’s super nice to have things the same across space or across time or both. I mean it’s nice to have those things but nothing explains why that uniformity. IC explains why you’ve got uniformity where you have uniformity and why you have non-uniformity on massive scales. It gives you a structure that accounts for the massive scales what looks like uniformity up to a point across space and what is rough uniformity across time and puts everything in a structure. So, there you go, that’s all I got. Comments?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are we able to translate geometry into mathematics into information to make them computable? Why is their sort of symmetry between those ways representing the universe?
Rosner: I mean the general answer is there are rules of existence and there are the rules of consistency. Things that exist cannot exist; that’s a big general principle. I mean except when they’re Quantum things and kind of be on the cusp of existence or non-existence but mega things; large existent things that definitely exist definitely exist and the contradiction is squeezed out as things come into existence. Things that are consistent and existent are generally embroiled with simple consistent systems like mathematics. For the most part, arithmetic is consistent and non-contradictory and it’s deep non-contradictory structure allows it to exist as a system that doesn’t blow up when you try to work with it and kind of means that things that exist materially embody some of those same non-contradictory structures because if they were contradictory they would blow up not like in an action movie but just in a way that they would preclude all but brief existence.
So, self-consistency and often simple self-consistent systems underlie a lot of the things that can exist. When you say simple self-consistent systems I think you can qualify it and say simple manifestations of self-consistent systems because when you look at the universe and the particles in the universe the particles that contribute most to macro systems kind of have simple ways of interacting across macro distances and macro time but then when you get into the micro world of subatomic physics, you have all these short distances, super high energies, and super short life spans of particles. And you’ve got a whole shitload of particles and interactions and it’s as if you’ve got these simple macro manifestations but somehow to preserve the non-contradictory nature of highly existent systems, you’ve got these underlying structures that I guess are kind of required by the consistency of existence that they’re complicated but maybe they’re the simplest underlying structure that permits consistent existence.
It’s the consistency that shows up all over the place, the mathematical consistency that allows for large-scale consistency. What happens at one place and at one time, informs the rest of the universe and doesn’t change depending on where you’re looking at that point in space and time from. Things within the universe have an absolute existence that’s proportional to the amount of existence in the entire universe. It’s hard to make things happen magically or magically change parts of the universe because the whole universe is woven together in a self-consistent structure. That’s kind of a requirement of existence.
Now you could argue in a simulated universe, you could have violations of everyday physics because you’ve simulated a universe, you’ve replicated consciousness for the beings that you’ve put in that universe, they think they’re living in a natural universe or maybe not and you can fuck with that universe. I mean there are principles that we live in a universe that apparently doesn’t do that argues right before, I don’t know what exactly, for the prevalence of apparently natural universes over apparently over simulated universes or you could argue that a simulated universe requires the beings who built the simulated universe who themselves are maybe more are likely to be living in a naturally occurring universe. Then you have to argue about what naturally occurring means. You have us existing as space-time and matter that we think is naturally manifested among the information structures that the universe is built out of.
Anyway, you got to define all these terms. The deal is that existence, at least natural existence, requires high degrees of self-consistency and very low levels of violations of consistency even in a simulated universe because a simulated universe implies a universe that contains the creators of that simulated universe that may itself be a natural universe. You start getting into turtles all the way down arguments like “Can you have a simulated universe within a simulated within a simulated?” or “Does it make more sense that at some point you’ve got a universe where the physical interactions play out a 100% according to the principles of quantum mechanics.
[Recording End]
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