this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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I know we'll probably never know, but I always wonder how the singularity came to be. Some will say it was a previous universe that reverted back and has been infinitely doing so, but how did it start??
I put it there. I thought it would be funny
You bastard
Because of you I have to go to work.
well how was I supposed to know my actions would have consequences?
Is it really so crazy to think that it might have always existed? I mean, it is very bold of us to assume that it is not possible to not have a starting point when there is so much we just don't know. We barely understand the physics of our universe when things start to get wonky.
In the grand scheme of things I guess it is not. The problem is that statement is infalsifiable, like the Last Thursdayism theory. Therefore, it falls into more of philosophical space, where Occam's Razor would eliminate this because the alternative requires less assumption. It isn't wrong, it just requires much more assumptions to be correct in order to work.
It is a bummer to think that we likely will never figure out for sure what happened before the big bang.
There are ways for things to come from nothing in quantum mechanics. Positive/negative particle pairs can pop into existence because their average energy is 0. They're typically very shortly lived though. It's possible it didn't come from anything and just was. Time is also part of space-time, so there wasn't a "before" most likely either
That is the question, what banged and why did it bang. There's some quantum theories that elude to a possible source of the big bang, but nothing widely accepted. As to why, that's an even tougher question.
The term singularity as applied in cosmology comes from the mathematical definition where one variable approaches infinity as another goes to zero. This is bad in math since it means an equation is not defined across all values. This is what happens mathematically as you get closer to time zero for the big bang. Same with the gravity of a black hole as you move toward the center. In that sense the size of the big bang at time zero would be zero, but the math breaks down so it's not actually defined. Physicists generally believe that's not the case due to the quantum nature of the universe, but we don't have the math to explore it.