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[Büge]

Wrong ism. That's solipsism.

[Classic]

More of a pan-solipsism,
probably based on the idea that reality is fundamentally limited in how we can understand it and as a result the best way to describe reality is the way that gives us the best model for it. i.e., Accurate is "accurate enough" rather than absolutely accurate because absolute accuracy isn't something we can (always or even often) guarantee.

No. back to sleep Classic.

[Catloaf]

Wrong ism. That's solipsism.

Whoops, that's what I get for trying to think in the morning sans pills and caffeine.

[Pacobird]

If Hawking describes it differently in BHoT, which I have not read, I will gladly bow to his expertise.  But for my part, the universe is defined as such because it has matter.  The empty vacuum between that matter is just that: a vacuum, not part of the universe per se, which resulted from the Big Bang.

Thinking about it like that, there isn't necessarily any problem with the idea that beyond the edge of the universe lies endless vacuum.

[Bal]

That's actually wrong. For one thing, there is no such thing as a true vacuum. That's more or less what quantum physics is all about, but even if a "true vacuum" what you have in there is space. Space is a thing unto itself. The theory of early universal spatial expansion is there to describe and explain the fact that, given current data on the age of the universe and its apparent size, it has to have, at some point, expanded faster than the speed of light. The problem here is that nothing can "move" faster than light (see: relativity), however space can EXPAND faster than the speed of light.

This is a useful analogy that is wrong in almost ever fundamental sense. Imagine that all matter, planets, stars, etc, is suspended in a three dimensional grid at fixed points. The grid is space, if you expand the area between each point on the grid the things suspended within, for all intent and purposes, move apart, however that are not, technically speaking, moving at all.  This allows for the size of the universe and the distribution of the matter therein to be what it seems to be without violating general or special relativity.

The "Light curtain" some of you seem to be referring to is actually just what is known as the "Observable Universe". This is the bubble of universe from which light will eventually reach Earth. Everything beyond this bubble will never reach us because of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

What defines the interior of the universe is space and physical law. There is no "outside" that we could comprehend, because it's not even nothing, it's way beyond what we would consider nothing, and even if there was something, say a border universe we could hop over to, you'd probably instantly die because the laws of physics there would almost certainly be different, and we depend on those laws every second of the day, which there might not even exist.

[Classic]

...
But we have no special reason to believe that different fundamental particles would coalesce from a similar but different expansion event, do we?
Does my question even still make sense?

[Bal]

Your question doesn't make sense because the pre-bang universe wasn't a "collection" of anything, it was one huge super particle in which all of the fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity) were crammed together into one "superforce" that, for the brief moment that this ultra hot, ultra dense thing existed, held it together. The answer to whether THAT can or would happen again, or even all the damn time, is that we have no reason to believe that it wouldn't, given the theories of how it came about to begin with (which are myriad and I'm not going to get into them because even physicists don't really have a strong enough theory on the table for that one). That's one of the reasons we try these mini-bangs, because they might tell us, through the forces released, what might have caused it to begin with.

[NexAdruin]

Thanks, Bal, for clearing that up. I am not good at explaining this sort of thing, even though I'm fairly confident in my grasp of it.

[Pacobird]

Awesome; thanks.

I am not totally sure I grasp this yet but I will think more about it!

[Bal]

A good thing to keep in mind when contemplating things like this is that even the experts have to use abstracts and analogies to explain them in anything other than pure mathematics because humans have literally no frame of reference for this shit.

[Büge]

Hence the brilliance of A Brief History Of Time. Particle spin make sense with playing cards, and relativity can be expressed with a graph.

[Classic]

"collection"

I don't think I ever used that word to describe the singularity. You describing forces differentiating also sounds familiar, but I guess my memories glossed over that and start with the... energy? pre-matter? coalescing into fundamental particles and building and when you mentioned physics coming about I kind of conflated the two.

[Bal]

Mostly the big bang resulted in hydrogen and helium and the four fundamental forces, and that's it. Everything else formed later due to gravitational forces and nucleogenesis. 

[Büge]

Mostly the big bang resulted in hydrogen and helium and the four fundamental forces, and that's it.

And time.

[Bal]

That's what the "Mostly" was for. I don't want to get into the potential dimensions and particles that also came into being around then.

[Rico]

I am disappointed that this thread title was used outside of Lust.

[Classic]

That's what the "Mostly" was for. I don't want to get into the potential dimensions and particles that also came into being around then.

Fermions. Man, those things are nuts.

[R^2]

I'm the one making all of you exist and have horrible lives.

You dick!

In my defense, you're all doing it to me as well.