No time existed before the Big Bang?
I was watching this documentary I don't recall the name of. I remember recognizing Stephen Hawking though, which is one of the reasons one of the statements made in the documentary caused me to raise my eyebrow and question the rationale put forth.
Summarizing, the narrator said that in essence, no time exists inside (close to?) a black hole. A clock that would travel into a black hole would stop ticking, or so the audience were told. I suppose it's fair enough to reason time no longer exists inside a black hole, though from where I am sitting -no astrophysics background whatsoever- it sounds like quite the assumption.
Anyways, it was argued that the Big Bang itself, the event that supposedly caused the universe to exist as we know it (even though we know very little of it), was some sort of black hole imploding on itself.
It was then argued, that, therefore, no time existed before the Big Bang. The documentary further argued, that since no time existed before the Big Bang, it was therefore impossible for some sort of grand designer to have existed, let alone create the universe.
Now, I'm not exactly in favor of pointing to a grand designer that created it all, but this documentary narrates flawed reasoning for such grand designer to not have existed.
The link that is being drawn between one type of black hole (the ones we think we have in our universe, that exist with surroundings, in which time exists) and another type of "black hole" (the one we can only speculate about, for which it is assumed no surroundings existed, in which time could have existed), in that in each type of black hole, no time exists nor existed, neglects the fact that outside of such black hole, surroundings may exist or may have existed, other localities if you will, in which thus also time may have existed. It's not like current black holes cause time to not exist anywhere outside of it, right?
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Several thoughts come to
Several thoughts come to mind.
(1) Remember that Hawkings has an axe to grind and is hardly objective. His disease is frightening and he feels betrayed. He is out to prove God doesn't exist, which is as impossible as proving God does exist. The best argument for the existence of God I have read is the argument of causality - what caused the big bang? All our science tells us something doesn't arise from nothing, so the big bang had to have a cause.
(2) The God I have studied (monotheistic God, not the gods of polytheism as they are within the created order) is other than the created order - the created order being our universe. God stands outside time, time is for our benefit, not God's. And, given the nature of both aspects of this assertion, it is doubtful a people living 3000 - 3500 years ago came up with this one all on their own. And, please no 'ancient aliens' speculation - we're talking about theories and facts not speculations and myths. Interestly, I have recently heard the thought that time is not real - which fits nicely into this understanding.
(3) The thought has occurred to me that given the cyclical nature of our universe the big bang problably repeats. From what I have read, massive black holes not only affect time, they affect space as well. As they grow larger they will 'fold space over' until all the matter in the universe - and that's a lot of matter given that the edge universe is said to be 13.5 billion light years from here - will reside in one infintely massive and infinitely tiny black hole. Which will probably blow up!
Unfortunately, this merely pushes the issue of causality back to the previous big bang - if there was one, we have no way to know this. And answers nothing about the origin of the universe or us.
I think I know who you're talking about...
Dr. Michio Kaku is a science fiction wri--excuse me, a "Theoretical Phisicist" who hosts the show Sci-Fi Science. Even though he says time is relative (see the video[0] on youtube), he doesn't seem to understand quite what that means. He says that as your speed increases, time slows (as according to the "special theory of relativity"). Such that, as we approach light-speed, time (for us traveling at that speed) slows to almost stopping (relative to those who aren't moving). That for someone standing still looking at the watch of someone moving at near light-speed it would appear that the watch is barely ticking (to that I say, "sure, because you only have a moment to see it tick, of course it would appear to not be moving").
However, if your thought process is at all logical, you'd understand that it's not time that speeds up or slows down, but the amount of time that it takes to travel between two points. That is because time is not, as he states (indirectly), different for everyone. If you have one person on a train and another standing on a sidewalk and the person on the sidewalk drops a coin, it will take the same amount of time for the coin to reach the sidewalk for both the person in the train and the person on the sidewalk, because "time" is the distance between events. The person on the train will just have less time to see the coin in travel.
Using that line of thought, you could argue both that time did and did not exist before the big bang. You could say that it did "exist" before, because you can measure backwords from when that event occured (even if there's no other reference point before then, you have all the points after). Or, you could say that it did not "exist", because there is no known event that occured before the big bang with which to relate to the big bang itself. It doesn't matter either way, because the big bang is just an event that we use as a point of reference, and had no purpose in the creation of time as we know it, except to give us a reference and set in motion all events that followed. Similarly, it doesn't matter whether time existed before the big bang, because if there was a "grand designer" (and I believe there was, though not necessarily as such), he could have created time, the big-bang, etc..
Reminds me of that artificial gravity "problem". Why should we need to create this huge ship that rotates to create it's own gravity, when it's well known (or should be well known) that if you accelerate constantly at the speed of gravity on Earth (more or less 32 ft/sec^2), you will be pushed against the ship with the same force with which you are pushed (or, pulled) down toward Earth. When you finally wanted to slow down, you could decelerate at the same constant speed.
[0]"How to Travel Through Time" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4_tHkkw7vk
(sorry for the long comment. I haven't given it to anyone else to edit/review, so there may be logical or factual errors, as I am more prone to create than some others.)
The issue of time
Hi,
either the documentary was wrong, or your understanding of what was presented to you is wrong. First the black hole -- it's false that there isn't time inside a blackhole. Usually, by inside we usually mean whatever-is-bellow-outer-event-horizon. And that's your usual four dimensional spacetime. If you fall into black hole your clocks will stop only when they break -- either due to tidal forces or by crashing to the singularity. Also you (or rather the broken you) will hit the singularity in finite proper time. However, an outside observer will never see you cross the horizon, for him, you'll cross it in his infinite future. So it seems like your clock almost stopped.
As for big-bang -- I'm not so up-to-date with the current cosmology but I think the idea of initial singularity is also outdated and it's more probable time existed even before the big-bang event. However, even if it hadn't existed it does not rule out the idea of "intelligent creator" at all. You can still embed such spacetime into something (of higher dimension) in which time exists even before the creation of the Universe and such higher being can live there. However, unless our Universe is some experiment of highly advanced beings from hyperspace, the idea of intelligent creator is very unprobable.