I have had a funny turn re the start of the universe

[Pruners]

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I don't know slubber.

Like....um.....nothing?

I bet it was dark and quiet. And possibly a bit damp.

oh Iknow pruners, how did space and time *not& exist before they existed?

And, what if there where hundreds of these tiny infantesimal dots of energy exploding? where did they all come from?

Fark my head hurts. I'm off to do some washing up and think some more.

What about black holes? What about gravity? Does anyone really understand gravity??? Coz sometimes I think I do and then when I think about it some more I don't get it again.

lol at all of us heading off to do some mundane shite with the questions of the universe churning away in our minds.

I'm going to clean my loos now.

How can anything be infinite?

Whether you're talking about the universe or a number (eg. pi), how can anything go on forever? Surely it can't, there has to be an end?

Nope Betty, it jst goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on

bit like a nagging child really

re: infinity - everyone...just look out of your window at the sky now.

Can you actually get your head round the fact that there is no end/finish/edge to what you are looking at?

That makes my brain hurt.

I read a book about quantam theory once, and I felt like there was a bit of my brain missing, I could feel it, the bit that was struggling to comprehend space and time and reality and alternate parallel universes.

I find it best to just concentrate very hard on something trivial, like cheese, until the feeling passes.

i walk around like this most of the time... these questions are always at the back of my mind whether i'm changing a foul nappy or going quietly mad in tesco.

i found a brief sense of 'reconciliation' and peace once after accidentally taking anti-inflammatorys on top of anti-depressants. Not something i'd recommend btw. Probably quite dangerous, but that aside, I was in bed and suddenly it all made sense. I stopped grasping after answers and just thought 'ahhh, i see.'

unfortunately it only lasted a few minutes and then i really did feel like my head was going to implode. ouch.

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Donnie Darko is ace. I love the eighties soundtrack

post loo cleaning my new thought in my head is 'why did the big bang happen?' Did all the time and matter and energy all squished up into the tiny dot of zero density just fancy a change?

The only way I can get round this one is to imagine God's finger by Michelangelo (Sistene chapel) sort of coming in from screen left (Terry Gillian style) and just giving it a poke.

I know that is a 'giant ultimate questions' cop out though.

I found Bill Bryson's science book good for this. Not that my understanding of the ishoos is any more advanced now, but my non-understanding is much more nuanced.

Don't let it worry you - apparently the new theory (my son has just completed a Physics degree at Cambridge and starts his Masters in the Autumn) is ... now bear with me here ... we are one of a series of universes but they do not collapse back to singularity each time before exploding again as previously thought. The universe expands to infinity and there is now some clever maths which can prove that this is, in fact, the same as singularity ... OK he heard this at a lecture where Stephen Hawking was in the audience so it was pretty much on the fringes of theoretical thinking but I thought it was worth mentioning.

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I'm still trying ot get my head around that 40ft tidalwave that will hit America when that big bit of land slides into the sea.

Sorry, bit vague but cannot remember the details, was a few months back and the only thing that suck in my mind was the tidalwave.

What caused the Big Bang?

'One notion is that perhaps the singularity was thre relic of an earlier, collapsed universe - that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes... others attribute [it] to what they call 'a flase vacuum'... some quality or thing that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness. It seems impossible that you can get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some aother forms altogether before the Big Bang - forms too alien for us to imagine - and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. 'These are very close to religious questions,' Dr Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001.'

go and have a lovely cup of tea./

OK, they probably didn't call it a 'flase vacuum'.

lazarou, that is some crazy knights move thinking you have got going on there.

Oh I am enjoying mn today. 1 cupcake thread and 1 what does it all mean thread, all happening simultanously.

But the good news is that the large Hadron collider (or whatever it's called) probably won't cause the earth to be swaloowd up in a black hole (or something), according to the latest risk assessment.

So that's one less thing to worry about when you're up at night pondering the origins of everything.

swaloowed?

See what just thinking of physics does to my brain?