[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to greg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>], who wrote in article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Ilya Zakharevich wrote: > > In pedantic mode: negative timestamps make sense with Big Bang as the > > epoch as well. (AFAIU, the current way of thinking is that it was > > "just too hot" before the big bang, it is not that "there was > > nothing".) > > If Stephen Hawking is right, the shape of the universe > is such that there isn't any time "before" the big bang > at all. It's like asking what's north of the North Pole.
I do not remember any statement like this - even from 70s... Could you provide a reference? There were conjectures about "initial singularity", but I do not recollect them related to SH. > Of course, this may have been replaced with some other > equally bizarre idea by now... Nothing as bizzare as the "initial singularity". There was a hot soup not very far from a phase transition point; stochastically, some micro-regions (bubbles) cool a little bit, and are subject to a phase transition; due to transition, the metric in them grows (inflation), so the "size" after transition [as seen from inside] is (hundreds? thousands? millions? - I do not remember) orders of magnitude larger than before transition - you get the universe-as-we-know-it as what sits inside a "visible horizon" in such a babble. Wiki for "inflation". > Another thought: If the cosmologists ever decide if > and when the Big Crunch is going to happen, we may be > able to figure out once and for all how many bits we > need in the timestamp. In the "hot soup", it is very hard to construct a watch. There may be even some quantum-mechanical restrictions on bit storage in so hot a matter (but I do not recollect seeing this). If so, then indeed, "nothing measurable" happens before and after inflation/collapse of the universe-as-we-know-it; so timestamp would be restricted to the interval between the bangs. Hope this helps, Ilya -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
