What Was Happening Before the Big Bang? w/Brian Greene | Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan's experience here is

what

I always wanted to ask someone like you,

what

do you think was

happening

before the Big Bang? Yes, it's a deep question and Anna it's a subtle question and there are two ways I would like to think about that question: It could be that the Big Bang was an interesting event but not the first event in the totality of reality. It could have been the first event that caused the expansion of our part of space, but it could be. that there is a larger realm of space within which we sit as a small part and that larger realm may have been here for a much longer period of time, it may have experienced its own big

bang

, it may be a collection of big

bang

s that can extend infinitely into the past, so it could be that the answer to the question of what happened before the Big Bang is that there were many other big bangs or many other quantum events that took place in a broader landscape of reality than we we have direct access.

Another answer is that the question itself may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest. We know how to analyze that sentence. We know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang because we know how to talk about the moment before. his birth or the moment before the Civil War or the moment before any event that has happened in the world, we completely understand the meaning of that type of sentence, but it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang the sentence doesn't actually mean nothing. It could be that the Big Bang was the place where time began and Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to convey this.

He said: Look, I'll disguise it a little. Imagine that you are walking on planet Earth and you pass by someone. Say, hey, can you point me north? I want to walk north. They point at you, you continue walking, you pass by someone. Say, hey, which way is further north and they point you in that direction, but when you get to the North Pole and talk to someone there and they say hey, how can I go further north? They look at you and say, wow, that question doesn't mean anything because this is where the north begins, there is no notion of going further north than the North Pole and it could be that spatial metaphor applies to time, we're talking about a billion ago. of years, ten billion years ago, but if we go back to 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang may be where time began and you can't go further back in time than the origin itself. about time itself, that scares me, yeah, look, that gets into your head, you know what you mean about the beginning of time, yeah, why would time have a good beginning and could it be that time is an emergent quality of reality?

I give you an analogy, boy, what I mean by that is that we all know what temperature means intuitively something is hot you feel that something is called you feel it your body understands those concepts what physics has done is delve into the concept of temperature and reveal that it is nothing more than the average movement of the particles that make up the environment, so if the molecules move very fast, we have a hot environment, if the molecules really move slowly, it is a cold environment, so that temperature arises from the motion of particles, so if you have like a particle, you can't really talk about it being hot or cold because you need a cluster, you need a cluster of particles to be able to talk about their average motion and, in that sense , temperature is this emergent idea that is based on more fundamental ideas the molecules and atoms that make up reality maybe that's true for time maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there is enough things arranged in the right patterns but fundamentally maybe there are atoms or molecules of time that when not organized in the way we know do not produce time as we know it.

Time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment, but it doesn't even apply in other environments that are set up radically differently. Wow, that's heavy, yeah, that's heavy, what's also heavy is what caused the Big Bang, yeah, why would something smaller than the head of a pin become everything we see in the cosmos, so any ideas for the answer? that question look, this is all tentative because it is very difficult to make measurements that go back to the beginning, we have astronomical observations that we must be sure are compatible with the predictions of our theories, etc., so we, as good scientists do what It may be necessary to try to test these ideas, but the idea that I think most physicists and cosmologists accept at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations, the usual form of gravity that you and I know is the attractive version that You drop something toward the Earth and it moves downward because the Earth and the object attract each other.

That's the ordinary gravity we experience every day of our lives, but Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to be repulsive too; You can push out instead of just pulling. inward and this is something we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the Earth is always the attractive variety. Gravity created by the Sun again, a compact object is always the attractive variety, but Einstein's mathematics shows that if you don't. I don't have a rocky object that is isolated in space, but rather energy that is distributed uniformly across a region of space, that type of entity produces repulsive gravity, why is it so important to your question if the early universe had that little pinhead that We're talking about if it were filled with a uniform bath of this energy, we call it a photon field.

The name doesn't matter, but if it were filled with that energy, it would have been subject to repulsive gravity. What pushes repulsive gravity? Everything separated causes everything to rush outward, so the Big Bang explosion may have been a spark of repulsive gravity that operated on a small region of space that separated everything. When this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical, we look at any kind of element in the universe that is theoretical, but is at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say makes it migrate into the realm of established understanding of how Gravity works, so Einstein's number one equations have been tested over and over again and in a whole variety of circumstances.

The detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago is like the crowning triumph of Einstein's mathematics a hundred years ago. mathematics says that there should be waves in the structure of space a hundred years later we finally detect waves in the structure of space space, so we are very comfortable with any prediction that emerges from Einstein's mathematics and right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I just described: you have uniform energy in a region of repulsive gravity, the other thing is that we are currently witnessing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down since the 1920s, everyone thought that yes, the universe It's expanding, but it will slow down over time, because because gravity pulls things back together, you throw an apple up, it doesn't go up any faster and the faster it goes. it is expanding more and more slowly because the Earth's gravity pulls it back everyone thought this would apply to the universe as a whole it is expanding but it is expanding more and more slowly observations in 1998 culminated in 1998 which won the Prize Nobel Prize in 2011 showed that distant galaxies are moving further apart more rapidly the expansion of space is accelerating over time it is accelerating How do we explain that the best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity? we believe that even today the universe is bathed in a bath of energy we call it dark energy we believe it goes uniformly through space I like to think of it almost like a Turkish sauna, it's like the steam that fills the sauna of this filled space of energy and that repulsive gravity that we believe is responsible for the observations that distant galaxies move away faster and faster over time. so it's circumstantial, but the repulsive gravity case is pretty strong and what would have caused it to fuse, which would have caused it to compress and initially, yeah, why would all of that matter being in this little one?

Yeah, less than the size of a pin, yeah, so I have no idea and no one else on planet Earth has any real idea. But we do have theories and one of the theories suggests that in the early universe there was a highly chaotic and very hot environment with all the fields fluctuating wildly up and down and the idea would be that if you wait long enough where it's hard to know what the weight in this environment, but don't pressure me with my definition of time back then, just intuitively, if you wait long enough on rare occasions, the energy will just happen. it flattens out in one region it becomes uniform and in that region it inflates explosively it grows, so you know it's like you're looking at a pot of boiling water, the surface of course ripples widely up and down, but if you wait it out, long enough, a long time since you've never seen it, not even me.

There will be a small spot on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out. Because that just means that the water molecules move for an instant in the right way to maintain that little spot. of water bubbling wildly will happen, it's rare, but if you wait long enough it will occur similar to the widely undulating fields in the early universe, if you wait long enough a patch will flatten out, you will get the uniform energy, plug it into Einstein's equations in that region. inflates explosively and I mean explosively, it can go from a size that is much smaller than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in much less than the blink of an eye in 10 to minus 30 10 to minus 35 seconds, so how powerful repulsive gravity can be. be, that's so baffling, yes, before that, before this happens, you just have in this theory that you have all this energy randomly interacting with other energy in the universe without physical objects, yes, yes, it could have been forever , that could and in fact, that's the main point, there's no one who was hanging around looking at their watch saying: OMG, when is this BIGBANG finally going to happen?

You know, so you can have this cosmological pre-show, you can have it last as long as you want. What has to happen is that sooner or later our region flattens out and then the cosmological spectacle begins and if we look at this model of the universe that is infinite universes but with different characteristics and different qualities, this could be

happening

. throughout infinity, yes, everywhere, yes, and in fact, this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject, says that it is very likely that this explosive inflation of the region we currently inhabit was just one of many of those events and therefore there are other remote regions across this broader cosmological landscape where things have also been inflated, but the details may be different, the physical details may differ from what we know and the differences may be small temperature differences in a part of space. versus another or they can be much more significant, even the particles that make up that other realm can be different from the particles that make up our realm, their masses can be different, their charges can be different, their fundamental physical characteristics can be different, so out there.

In that broader cosmological landscape, it may be the Wild West of realities and you don't have to worry about protons. In inner Asia, there may be kingdoms where they don't have to worry about protons falling apart. The really crazy idea is that if you are very careful mathematically and analyze these theories you realize that there have to be realms that duplicate ours and many may be different, but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiated and occur out there. in other realms, so you come up with these crazy sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this in other distant realms, an infinite number of traps an infinite number of times and, furthermore, small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are swapped at the table or you know, maybe your name is Joe Greene and I'm Brian Rogan or there are strange realities that can take place and this is not the imagination of an overloaded theorist, this is the careful and dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations now I should say that there are some physicists who see this implication and say: wow, you guys have fallen off the deep end, your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts those kinds of realities that are kind of untestable because we are so far away that we will never interact with them, that is the kind of theory we have been trained to avoid eliminating hmm, however, the more you know, thinking about the future, I would like to describe us, physicists say, hey, the mathematics haveIt has proven to be a very valuable guide over hundreds of years and if this is where mathematics takes us, it is at least worth paying attention to investigate it thoroughly and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality behaves. , Jesus.