Time after time

[Skybird]

What if Brahma is sleeping, and while he is breathing in his dream, every stroke of breath embraces one universe from birth to death, as if breathing the universe in and out?

From CalTech:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm

I often made mockery of the Big Bang, for it always found it too hilarious to even consider that where there was nothing before, all of a sudden from "nothing" "something" jumps into existence like crazy, without time, space and matter needed, and without having an explanation why the event took place when nothing was there. So regarding Big Bang I always ask immediately - why has there not remained to simply be NOTHING, non-existence? This cosmologistic idea always made no sense to me, and left me totally unsatisfied.

The guys at CalTech now seem to be in pursuit of hints that science maybe need to correct some very basic and important assumptions regarding of how the universe began. they place the Big Bang into an already existing context - a univese that already existed before, and just gets shuffled, charged and restarted, so to speak.

Which somehow sends a greeting at old ancient Hindu cosmology, that Brahman is sleeping, and his breath expaninding and declining the universe in his aeons-long sleep.

One falls silent when standing at the abyss of such thoughts, timeframes, and ideas. Only Einstein comes to the mind: "imagination is more important than knowledge". Only mind can reach where no technology and science maybe can ever reach for the forseeable couple of dozens of millions of years.

At least man's science. but life probably has so many faces that most of them we are unable to perceive even when standing right in front of them. we know a bit about the way life formed out on planet earth. To assume that all life there is is made by the same energetic and molecular patterns we cleverly form theories on, down here on our little planet, is absurd in the face of how much beyond imagination the size of the universe is.

[MothBalls]

42.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by MothBalls

42.

Hahahaha! Close! The answer to time after time though is in this song:

http://www.badongo.com/file/9764141

-S

[August]

Originally Posted by MothBalls

42.

It's been awhile since i've seen it but is that a reference to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by any chance?

[jumpy]

What? You mean the ultimate question, to life, the universe and everything?

[MothBalls]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The guys at CalTech now seem to be in pursuit of hints that science maybe need to correct some very basic and important assumptions regarding of how the universe began.

Good article.

Science may make the corrections. 50 years from now, we'll correct the corrections. It wasn't so long ago in our history that the world was flat. What we think we prove to be fact, may change yet again as the tools of science improve. In just a few months, we get to witness a replay of the seconds after the big bang, once the LHC is finished.

It really is hard to imagine that there was absolute nothingness, then all of a sudden everything we know exists. I also have a problem with infinite. Hard to figure out how we fit into the grand scheme of things.

The scientific explanations are no better than "Horton Hear's a Who". To me, that's just as plausible as any other explanation. Until I can touch and feel the right answer, I stick to my original answer. It's 42.


<edit> Best video I've ever seen on the size of the universe. . Really does make you feel small.

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by August

It's been awhile since i've seen it but is that a reference to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by any chance?

Dl my file. you'll like it and i assume you are old enough to appreciate it.

-S

[August]

Originally Posted by jumpy

What? You mean the ultimate question, to life, the universe and everything?

Yeah it was fourty something if i recall correctly.

[Blacklight]

The thing is.. we know the Big Bang happened because there's a MASSIVE ammount of evidence for it, but studying and figuring out what went on before it (or even what happened before the first five secconds) is pretty much impossible without gaining a LOT more knowledge. We first need to focus on unifying Quantum Mechanics with Relativity.. and then we have to figure out what all this Dark Energy is before we can even BEGIN to tackle the cause of the Big Bang.
There are lots of theories to the cause of the big bang, but they'll all be hard to prove without a grand unified theory under our belts.

Physics and Cosmology is a subject I read quite a bit about (About half of the bookcase in this room is full of books on the subjects). It's very interesting stuff.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

Physics and Cosmology is a subject I read quite a bit about (About half of the bookcase in this room is full of books on the subjects). It's very interesting stuff.

It is indeed, but a dangerous deed of daring to balance on a small edge between the lovely rosegarden of imgination with the artist's brush lead by reason and observation on the one side, and the abyss of a hungry jaw of madness, going nuts, and superstitition on the other side.

In the end, all science is just our artifical order that we try to design and sometimes rearrange so that what we believe to observe seems to fit best into it'S orders and categories. Being capable to do so, fulfills our hunger for controlling things, for man cannot stand to be at the mercy of fate or random events that are beyond his knowledge and controllability. We NEED the feeling that we can control our fate and that way protect our existence and enforce our justified stand in the universe. But scientific order is not the essence of nature, but it is OUR artifical order and OUR set of invented mental categories. Science does not really reveal reality - we create our reality by it, and our invention of scientific models feed back into our perception and reasoning by filtering these perceptions of the world as well as our interpretations of it. It's like our mind dancing with it'S plenty of ideas, and the waltz itself that is resulting is what we call the world, or the ball. If you want to learn about the space up there and out there, you need to familiarize yourself with the space within your mind. Both are one and the same space I am sure, with different soap bubbles in it, and some are bigger and some are smaller, but both inside and outside each bubble it is one and the same space nevertheless. Just that some bubbles hold smaller bubbles inside of them, and so on. Bu even in the most inner buble there is, you have nothing else than the same empty space like outside the most pouter bubble.

Over 20 years ago, Gary Zukav named his famous physics book "the dancing Wu Li masters", some people who read Fritjof Capras "The Tao of Physics" back then also may have read his book as well. Wu Li is the chinese term that equals what we call "physics", he said, and it means "structures of organic energy". I like that description much better than our word "physics", for it became clear that we need to learn that we do not deal so much with solid structures, but ever changing patterns, and not with solid matter in the meaning of "object", but movement that creates the illusion of form, but in reality both object and movement is just energy.

[Oberon]

I think what it comes down to is the Big Crunch vs Continual Expansion. Should the Big Crunch theory be correct, then perhaps the Big Bang is a result of the Big Crunch and this universe is in fact the hundredth odd such universal cycle, and one day it will stop expanding, collapse in on itself and set up another cycle. This is of course, the simple answer, and one which I like to use to avoid my brain imploding But of course, it is not an answer, for an answer you need evidence and (thankfully, in a way) we have not received any evidence that the universe is beginning to slow in its expansion, however there is definately something older than the 'Big Bang' as has been recently found, so perhaps that echo is the echo of the universe before us?
Which raises the interesting question, which always makes me stop and think, and which Skybird has accurately pointed out, what was there BEFORE the first Big Bang? Brahmas first breath

I think that there are some questions to which we shall never find the answers, perhaps this is one of them, but of course it is an essential part of human nature, and one I think to be proud of, that we shall never stop trying to find the answer.