Mostly agree. But like matter, nobody ever said the energy was "created" by the Big Bang. "Liberated" might be a better word. Anyone who said created was giving their (incorrect) interpretation of the theory.Prodigal_Sun wrote:Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so it isn't possible for there to have been a time where there was no energy, and then suddenly there was.jeffcoslacker wrote:Time is meaningless and irrelevant if it doesn't describe some action of matter, which is caused by energy in some form or another. The initial form of the energy released was completely and purely incoherent, and matter did not exist in ANY form, so time within that framework is kinda moot (heh, finally got to use it), except MAYBE as a function of the rate of temperature change as expansion took place. But I would think that even if it did have any relevance, as you say it would not be on the scale we're accustomed to.Prodigal_Sun wrote:
But it's a poor reference point. A million years seems like a long time to us, because we know that the universe has existed for billions, but if you follow that second back infinitely at some point in time a second was an eternity.
Until a certain point, no matter, no light, no force carriers (NO, not Midi-chlorians, jeez [emoji2] ), not even the actual LAWS of quantum physics or gravity or electro-magnetism or any of that would exist. The framework upon which they exist could not even exist yet.
Looking at it from the rate of expansion point of view, you look at time vs distance so as the seconds that have existed become fractionally smaller and smaller so too does the space the Universe occupies. It would have all been contained in fractions of millimeters, going back logically. Just like one "day" an infinite number of years in the future a century, by our measurement, will pass like a millisecond. As long as it's passing through the void of space it will theoretically never stop expanding, unless "dark matter" is found to occupy the depths of space and has a mass to act against the expansion, if so, than one day the expansion will stop. All the stars will have burnt out and the Universe will be still. And dark, but "filled" will these "massive" objects in the space that it expanded to, and beyond that would be nothing, but potential energy expanding out into the void searching for a place to happen.
So, anyway. Towards the beginning, the rate of expansion would have happened rapidly, because of all the stored up energy, but relative to the amount of time that has ever existed, it would have taken all of eternity to happen. Follow?
And actually the endless expansion scenario, if it were to work that way, is even more dismal than what you said. Take a quick read on "Ultimate heat death of the universe" on Wikipedia or anywhere else you can find a decent reference. It describes the timeline for the universe to use itself up (maximum entropy) and spread too thin for anything left to interact with anything else. All the way out to the time that individual atoms finally fall apart and there's nothing left but a kind of haze of photons and weakly energetic sub-atomic particles that can no longer join up to do anything. At that point, gravity would no longer exist, matter could never be created again, and the whole thing just slowly falls apart becoming more and more diffuse until it is essentially gone.
How sad. No trace of what it once was....
EDIT: I missed your last post. You are obviously familiar with the heat death scenario [emoji106]
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