Comment on 1.1 History

• crapwittyname@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What’s nothing like? Before the big bang, there was nothing. What the fuck colour was it? How does that even work?

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  • dragonflyteaparty@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You and me both. I love documentaries and when I get on a space kick, I think about this a lot. What did it look like? What’s nothing? My brain can’t fathom literally nothing. It had to be some sort of something. Almost makes me want to say that the universe does have a creator, but in that case, where’d the creator come from? (My favorite creation myth is that the Goddess danced and galaxies spun off on her dress. Makes as much sense as any of the others.)

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  • hydrospanner@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Also: if there was nothing, then what went bang?

    Just as important, why did it go bang?

    Not to open an entirely different can of worms, but aside from the presence or lack of an actual character in the role, religious and scientific theories on the beginning of everything are similarly unfulfilling.

    “First, there was nothing. Then a thing happened, and there was something!”

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    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s the same for the beginnings of life. We know loads about the conditions before in happened and after it happened, but nothing about that all important instant when it happened.

      I like the thinking that small pockets of potential started to form, since a pair of opposed charges is sort of the same as nothing. But that does go along the lines of “nature abhors a vacuum” type of thinking, which has been comprehensively proven wrong since it was popular. Also it doesn’t explain one of physics greatest mysteries: why is there so much matter and no antimatter. If things came into existence in opposing pairs, we should see equal amounts of both

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  • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’d assume black, no? Just total, unending, absolute darkness? Space is mostly vacuum with unimaginable distances between anything, and that empty, void space is basically pockets of the nothingness that existed before the big bang, so I’d (with my limited experience) assume something similar.

    Though how it works? Yeah I have no fucking clue man, it’s basically incomprehensible isn’t it? Just the absence of existence. If I remember right, I heard at the time that all the matter of the universe was condensed into a singular point, and the big bang was basically that exploding, but it’s hard to imagine that it was the only thing that existed, and that there was nothingness beyond it.

    You ever wonder if human minds just biologically aren’t equipped to understand or comprehend this stuff? Same way ants can’t possibly fathom the existence of radio waves or apes can’t understand trigonometry or how it works?

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    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Absolutely. I am completely convinced of the fact that there is knowledge that we can never possess simply because our minds aren’t capable of understanding it. I mean nobody understands quantum theory. Some people can do the maths and make the right predictions etc, but they have absolutely no idea what’s really going on. I think that’s at the boundary of our understanding. Which means there’s other stuff being the boundary, and other stuff way way beyond the boundary. But, I think that in the same way you can explain general relativity to a child in simple terms, if we produce AI that can grasp higher concepts, it could explain it to us.

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    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You ever wonder if human minds just biologically aren’t equipped to understand or comprehend this stuff? Same way ants can’t possibly fathom the existence of radio waves or apes can’t understand trigonometry or how it works?

      I’m disinclined to believe that if for no other reason than I’m sure similar things have been said many times throughout human history about any number of subjects that were then much more fully explored and understood. Anatomy, biology, genetics, etc. all seemed to be fields that were “mysteries too far beyond human comprehension”…until they weren’t.

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