Big Bang Is Not the Beginning of the Universe. In Other News: Duh.

Posted on February 24th, 2008 by Carlos

Wired’s blog had a write up of Neil Turok, one of the big M-Theory brains at Cambridge, who is proposing the multiverse-rending idea that the Big Bang wasn’t the start of all space and time, and instead is one of many cycles of “Bangs.” He posits that space and time have no beginning.

But haven’t plenty of other people beforehand? I know I myself have long thought this to be the case, and I can do about as much String Theory math as a post-brainectomy Rob Schneider. Maybe the point is that he has the arithomancy to back him up, whereas fulanos like me are just talking out of their asses?

Still though, I can see how he feeds his critics. As speculative as M-Theory is now — as yet there is not a single tenet of String Theory that has been verified through experimentation — there is positively no way he can claim that the universe (multiverse, infiniverse, whatever) has no beginning. Let’s say his math bears out and the Big Bang of circa 16.2 billion years ago was not the start of all things spacey and timey — that does not prove that there NEVER was, at some point in the past (of course, I am being plebianly naive about my notions of time here, but stick with me), an even Bigger Bang that started things off. He’s just riffing. And that ain’t science.

Also, when he starts explaining how his “no beginning” theory works via a metaphor of air molecules, he totally loses me. I like to think the fault is his, not mine.

Imagine you have a room full of air, with all these molecules banging around. The vast majority of time, these molecules spread uniformly — but once in a trillion trillion years, they all end up in the corner of the room. If you look at the room and run the clock forward, they’ll eventually make themselves uniform: But it would reverse, and you’d watch them flying into the corner. Then they’d fly out again.

If this is right, it means that time runs forward for a while. Then there’s a random state without an arrow of time, then time runs backwards, and then time runs forward again. That’s the bigger picture: We’re still very far away from understanding it, but that would be my bet.

Based on his metaphor, there is no reason to believe that the arrow of time would start flipping around like the spinning arrow of a board game. Why are you running your clock forward and backward? Sure, once in a trillion trillion years, the air molecules will all clump together in one area. But you don’t need to run the clock backward to unclump them: just wait a few frickin’ seconds and, with the plain old arrow of time that we know and love, the molecules will once again distribute themselves throughout the room. Why does time go nuts? No way to know from that visualization.

But okay, let’s say the metaphor was bad but that his current math says time will stand still for a while, and then time will go backwards for a while. Um … wait. If time stands still at any given point, doesn’t that mean, by definition, that time can no longer have an arrow, ever again? Once time stops, what will motivate it to begin moving again? Unless time itself exists under the aegis of some larger “meta-time” through which it can move, how can it start again after stopping?

That last point I am sure is my ignorance, but I will also bet that it is based on a larger ignorance about time. Time is the biggest mystery in the infiniverse. We can’t even define it very well. We can only talk about it practically: that is, in terms of clocks and the measures we use to codify it. But as to what time is? No idea.

Frankly, I believe that the arrow of time is more immutable than current String- and M-theorists credit it. I am more than happy to be proven wrong, but please, someone, prove something about time that helps us really understand its nature and function.