this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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technically, no, the universe wasn't the size of a pinpoint, the visible universe may have been that size, but the capital-u Universe is very possibly infinite, so it was still infinite back then, just denser. /Much/ denser.
Two points on opposite ends of the visible universe right now (90-something billion light years apart) used to be a millimeter away from each other. Every thing and every where today was there then, just unimaginably compacted, and hot, hot enough to melt matter into an infinite quark gluon plasma. So there were no atoms, no protons even...so dense it would immediately collapse into a black hole today, but with just as much stuff in every direction, there was nowhere for the stuff to condense into.
So yeah, don't fill up your suitcase that much, or you'll make a black hole and your socks will be gone, like /really/ gone
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??
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.