[Nuke]

Boooo...and I had just managed to get really excited over this after watching an episode of "Through the Wormhole" on Science Channel. Seriously, if you ever want to get psyched about something, just listen to Morgan Freeman narrate it.

really?  honestly i find it droning.

and the one episode of it i've seen wasn't all that intriguing.  but maybe that was due in part to me being put off by the tone it was taking of "this hair-brained theory is absolutely right, and all the other hair-brained theorys are completely wrong.  no, we're not going to offer any evidence or explanations why." 

i find that a lot of astrophysics documentaries are dumbed down to the point that theres no point in watching them if you have any real interest in math or physics. i find you really have to watch a lot of them to find ones that actually provide new information presented in a way that doesnt numb your mind.

[watsisname]

Sadly I have to agree with you on that. 

And every time I hear a documentary say that there was "nothing" before the Big Bang, I die a little.

[IronBeer]

Asking "what happened before the Big Bang" is similar to dividing by zero; the answer is simply undefined. Near as we can tell, the Big Bang is the beginning of time from a human-perceptible reference frame- any events that occur before that will inherently be excluded from our investigations.

At least, that's how I understand the present theories.

[S-99]

Reminds me of time travel. If humans ever develop time travel. I wonder what would happen to the person we send to before the big bang. Surely that person would experience a different existence of time and space for a little while, maybe longer, or not at all (who knows or "pffffft"). Test it on convicts, and the time machine just might bsod. Human perceptible time might be something we only would think a time machine could be able to do (i however do not expect a time machine to be able to travel to a time when time was completely absent though).

Then again, you're talking to the guy who at least thinks the only division by zero that should be defined is zero divided by zero, which would i say would be zero. Nothing divided by nothing, and you would expect to end up with nothing. I see this as very different than something like one divided by zero which would make you wake up burping out your ass and farting out your mouth, or a cataclysm.

Of which case now there's nothing but imagination and ideas that can't be proven for what happened before the big bang and will be excluded from investigations (and not too much reference from what we do actually know being progression of time and absence of it).

[Bobboau]

if by "different existence of time and space" you mean death, then yes, that is exactly what he would experience.

[S-99]

Death most likely. Then again, we don't know if humans can survive in non human perceptible time.

[Bobboau]

that may be true, but we do know that humans cannot survive in the core of a super-massive star, and the early universe would have been vastly less hospitable than that.

[watsisname]

Ah, but S-99 said before the Big Bang.

[Bobboau]

your right, I'm sure that the entire universe worth of energy compressed into an infinitely small space would look something like a peaceful meadow with cool water, green grass, populated by quasi-sentient ponies.

[Mongoose]

PONIES!!!

[Kolgena]

Um, my physics textbook disagrees with you. It says very clearly that there would be unicorns not ponies. You probably want to check your sources.

[Topgun]

Um, my physics textbook disagrees with you. It says very clearly that there would be unicorns not ponies. You probably want to check your sources.

There are conflicting theories.

[watsisname]

your right, I'm sure that the entire universe worth of energy compressed into an infinitely small space would look something like a peaceful meadow with cool water, green grass, populated by quasi-sentient ponies.

Sure, why wouldn't it?  I also expect it to be raining naked purple women and candy bars.  Indeed this is predicted from Quantum Unified Field Theory.

[S-99]

your right, I'm sure that the entire universe worth of energy compressed into an infinitely small space would look something like a peaceful meadow with cool water, green grass, populated by quasi-sentient ponies.

WRONG
I'm sure it'd actually look like this.