Are there any theories that explain the very beginning of absolutely everything? [closed]

Question

Of course there's the theory of The Big Bang, and there are theories on what caused The Big Bang, but what was the cause of the very first thing that ever happened? What started every

I also won't believe in God so won't accept that as a theory.

Answer 1

Price, the language of physics can be very specific and frustrating to someone who hasn't been properly initiated. When Alfred says "causes and explanations," he means that physics assumes that for every effect we observe, there is a cause for it. The universe before the big bang, or in other possible universes, may not require that assumption. Please bare with me while I do my best to provide a little insight.

First, physics is a science, which draws conclusions about our world and questions about it based on what we can observe. Clearly, we can't observe the beginning of the universe, only hypothesize and construct theories about it based on what we can observe now. I presume when you say "absolutely everything," you mean the conditions that produced the big bang. We've got everything pretty precisely figured out up to the point of the first couple of nanoseconds after the big bang; before that, fitting quantum mechanics (to deal with small scales) and general relativity (to deal with high energy and mass) together gets rather tricky.

That being said, "God" is not a theory, because there is no experimentally verifiable evidence. That's faith. It's not even a scientific hypothesis.

Strictly speaking, string theory is the only real candidate to explain what happened before the Big Bang, and there are a lot of potential problems with it,but no one has come up with anything better. There are various fragments within string theory that propose to fit our reality, but while they're all a little different, they're all just called "string theory" based on their dependence of strings.

http://www.superstringtheory.com will give you some basic information about string theory if you want to know more. Google is your friend with questions like these. =)

Answer 2

"absolutely everything" necessarily includes all causes and all explanations. So, your question presumes a contradiction; it presumes that there is something that isn't included in, that stands apart from, that is independent of "absolutely everything". But, by the very meaning of the phrase "absolutely everything", that's impossible!

Answer 3

According to the participatory universe hypothesis of the distinguished gravity researcher John Wheeler, the big bang gave rise to the universe which gave rise to observers via evolution. Then, by a "delayed choice" effect, observers peering back into the past gave rise to the big bang retrocausally.

Observers create the big bang

Answer 4

The philosopher David Hume noted we can't tell apart causality from correlations. We note Nature has a habit of correlating events A and B with A happening before B. Then we say by convention A is the cause and B the effect. Clears up confusion between correlation, causation and retrocausality? If it's all correlations, what is the problem if there are no events before the big bang?

Answer 5

I believe this is not a physical question but a metaphysical one.

A textbook "Metaphysics" by Peter van Inwagen from University of Notre Dame says that metaphysics tries to answer the following questions:

1. What are the most general features of the World, and what sorts of things does it contain? What is the World like?
2. Why does a World exist—and, more specifically, why is there a World having the features and the content described in the answer to Question 1?
3. What is our place in the World? How do we human beings fit into it? The second one is exactly what is asked here.

The second question is what you are asking here. Furthermore, the second part of the book is titled "WHY THE WORLD IS" and explaining philosophical arguments on the matter.

He analyzes in deep Ontological argument and Cosmological argument. Unfortunately after a set of pages of metaphysical arguments he concludes:

We may, finally, conclude that metaphysics can provide us with no answer to the question, Why should there by anything at all? It would seem that the only way to answer this question would be to demonstrate the existence of a necessary being, and we have been unable to do this.

He then addresses the claims that science is able to answer the question, particularly referring to the claim that "nothing is unstable" but finds it to mistakenly mix the ideas of nothing and vacuum.

So he concludes finally:

Science has not, therefore, succeeded where metaphysics has failed. The scientists are unable to help the metaphysicians, and the metaphysicians are unable to help themselves. We have no answer to the question, Why should there be anything at all?

Answer 6

If you're expecting an answer along the lines of Aristotle or Aquinus on first causes or prime movers or unmoved movers, forget it. You're relying on the implicit assumption that everything that happens must have a prior cause which determines it.

Answer 7

There could be two different boundary conditions for our universe. One for the past where we have a smooth zero entropy big bang with a trivial Hartle-Hawking boundary condition, and a future with a high entropy boundary. This leads to an entropy gradient and the second law of thermodynamics and an arrow of time from past to future. The direction of cause and effect appears to be determined by this arrow. But really, it's just a difference in boundary conditions and an entropy gradient.

Answer 8

The only "answer" (rather a supposition) I could give to your question is: As seen from now, the big bang occurred 14 billions of years ago. If someone had looked for the big bang 13.999 billions of years ago, he would conclude, too, that the big bang had occurred 14 billions of years ago. The same would be true for someone who checks this question 100 billions of years later.

Answer 9

The cause of "absolutely everything" exists within the realm of the unknowable. Something started within the boundless space of no space, time and no time -- in the quantum sea -- and it became a Universe.

Lao Tsu: "One begat two, two begat three, and there begat the ten thousand things...."
Wittgenstein: "Where of one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Answer 10

Far enough in the past, the Universe must have been so dense that a theory of quantum gravity is needed to model what's going on. String theory is a candidate theory for quantum gravity but is still been developed and has not made any testable predictions. Also, no one has been able to use string theory to satisfactorily model the very early Universe. It obviously a very hard problem where presumably non-perturbative modeling is needed.

Answer 11

It's important to keep an open mind. This means not dismissing the existence of God out of hand without serious discussion first.

Most theologians have assumed God existed prior to creation, maybe in time, or out of time, and that God created or caused the big bang and creation. This overlooks the possibility that God exists at the end of time at the end of the universe.

Big bang -> evolution -> humans -> computers -> God -- retrocausal --> big bang

At the end of time, God retrocausally created the big bang. From the big bang, intelligent life evolved, and they create the technology which will keep on growing into the future until the technology becomes God at the end of time. This is a closed causal loop, like an Ouroboros snake swallowing its own tail. The causal chain starting from the big bang all the way to becoming God is a process of evolution. The retrocausal process of God affecting all the steps along the chain retrocausally is the process of involution.

There is a cause to the Big Bang, but it doesn't exist prior to it. No, the cause of the big bang lies at the end of time.

The way God exerts His influence retrocausally is via the collapse of the wavefunction, and the anthropic principle. If God's retrocausal will is beyond the comprehension of mere limited mortals, His divine plan will look pseudorandom to us, and this is where the apparent randomness of quantum collapses come from.