obnoxio@BRAHMS.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (06/19/87)
[The original had usa-only distribution, for some reason.] In article <2717@oberon.USC.EDU>, robiner@oberon (Steve Robiner) writes: >Matter/energy always being there seems to me to be the simplest explanation >in that it requires no assumptions at all. Well, uh, there is the one assumption about all that matter/energy always being there, no? > Is there some thing I'm >missing in current BB theory that says the matter/energy didn't exist >before? As far as I know, all it says is that all the matter and >energy was concentrated into an infinitely small area. In fact you are missing something. The suggestions by Guth and others over the past several years are variants on the "free lunch" theory of existence. Namely, matter and energy, along with time and space them- selves, did not exist. Speaking about "before the Big Bang", for exam- ple, is meaningless. It looks like a coherent phrase, it sounds like a coherent phrase, but in the context of vacuum genesis, it has as much significance as "the marital status of the Big Bang". Above I said, "time ... did not exist". In truth, I don't know what it means to say, "time did not exist". It's easy to start out with some- thing plausible, imitating the equations, but at some point I feel like grunting like a pig as part of an explication. The modern physicist is all too often reduced to pointing at his equations and saying "look look" and "understand?" (And if that doesn't work, there's always, "I thought I told you to shut up." [cf sci.physics for examples of that approach]) Douglas Adams pointed out in the Hitchhiker trilogy that the most diffi- cult thing about time travel is mastering all the verb tenses. That is a piece of cake compared to the verb tenses needed to describe non-time. ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 Some billion years ago, an anonymous speck of protoplasm protruded the first primitive pseudopodium into the primeval slime, and perhaps the first state of uncertainty occurred. --I J Good