What Was Happening Before the Big Bang? w/Brian Greene | Joe Rogan

the Joe Rogan experience here's the thing that I've always wanted to ask someone like you what do you think was happening before the Big Bang yeah it's a it's a it's a deep question and Anna subtle one and there's sort of two ways that I'd like to think about that question one is it could be that the Big Bang was an interesting event but not the first event in the totality of reality it could have been the first event that sparked the expansion of our part of space but it could be that there's a grander realm of space within which we sit as a small part and that grander realm may have been here for a far longer period of time it may have experienced its own big bang's may be a collection of big bangs that may extend infinitely far into the past so it could be that the answer to the question what happened before the Big Bang is a lot of other big bangs or a lot of other quantum events that were taking place in a larger landscape of reality then we have direct access to however another answer is that the very question may not make as much sense as the words seem to suggest we know how to parse that sentence we know what it means to talk about the moment before the Big Bang because we know how to talk about the moment before your birth or the moment before the Civil War or the moment before any event that happened the world we fully understand the meaning of that kind of sentence but it could be that when it comes to the Big Bang the sentence actually doesn't mean anything it could be that the Big Bang was the place where time itself started and Hawking himself had a wonderful analogy to get this across he said look I'll dress it up a little bit imagine you're walking on planet earth in you pass by someone you say hey can you point me in the direction of North I want to walk in the northward direction they point you continue to walk you pass by somebody up say hey which way is further north and they point you in that direction but when you get to the North Pole and talk to somebody there and say hey how do I go further north they look at you and say whoa that question doesn't mean anything because this is where north begins there's no notion of going further north than the North Pole and it could be that that spatial metaphor applies to time talk about a billion years ago ten billion years ago but if you go to 13.8 billion years ago the Big Bang that may be where time started and you can't go further back in time than the very origin of time itself that freaks me out yeah see that that's one that it gets in your head you know what do you mean beginning of time yeah why would time have a beginning good and it could be it could be the time is an emergent quality of reality I give you an analogy boy what I mean by that is we all know what temperature means intuitively something's hot you feel that something's called you feel it your body understands those concepts what physics has done is it's gone deeper into the concept of temperature and revealed that it is nothing but the average motion of the particles making up the environment so if the molecules are moving really quickly you've got a hot environment if the molecules are really moving slowly it's a cold environment so temperature emerges from the motion of particles so if you have like one particle you can't really talk about it being hot or cold because you need a conglomerate you need an agglomeration of particles to be able to talk about their average motion and in that sense temperature is this emergent idea that rests upon more fundamental ideas the molecules and atoms that make up reality maybe that's true of time maybe time as we know it is a property that only makes sense in certain environments when there's enough stuff arranged in the right patterns but fundamentally maybe there are atoms or molecules of time which when not arranged in the form that we are familiar with don't yield time as we know it time itself may be a quality of the world that exists here in this environment but doesn't even apply in other environments that are configured radically differently whoa that's a heavy one yeah that's a heavy one what also is a heavy one is what caused the Big Bang yeah why would something smaller than the head of a pin yeah become everything that we see in the cosmos so there are ideas for the answer to that question look all this is tentative because it's very hard to do measurements that go all the way back to the beginning we have astronomical observations that we need to be sure are compatible with the predictions of our theories and so forth so so we as good scientists do what needs to be done to try to test these ideas but the idea that I think most physicists are cosmologists buy into at the moment is that gravity can have two manifestations the usual form of gravity that you and I know about is the attractive version you drop something toward the Earth and it moves downward because the earth and the object pull on each other that's the ordinary gravity that we experience every day of our lives but Einstein's equations actually allow gravity to also be repulsive it can push outward as opposed to just pulling inward and this is something that we have never experienced because the gravity created by a rocky object like the earth is always the attractive variety the gravity created by the Sun again a compact object is always the attractive variety but Einstein's math shows that if you don't have a rocky object that's isolated in space but rather energy that is uniformly spread through a region of space that that kind of entity yields repulsive gravity why is that important to your question if the very early universe that little tiny head of a pin that you're talking about if it was filled with a uniform bath of this energy we call it the in photon field the name doesn't matter but if it was filled with that energy it would have been subject to repulsive gravity what does repulsive gravity do pushes everything apart causes everything to rush outward so the bang of the Big Bang may have been a spark of repulsive gravity operating with a tiny region of space that pushed everything apart when this concept of repulsive gravity is just theoretical we observed any sort of element in the universe that it is theoretical but it's at a level of understanding that I think most physicists would say causes it to migrate into the camp of established understanding of how gravity works so number one Einstein's equations have now been tested over and over again and a whole variety of circumstances the detection of gravitational waves just a couple of years ago it's like the the crowning triumph of Einstein's math a hundred years ago the math says there should be ripples in the fabric of space a hundred years later we finally detect ripples in the fabric of space so we are very comfortable with any prediction that comes out of Einstein's mathematics and right in the mathematics is the prediction of what I was just describing you've got uniform energy in a region repulsive gravity the other thing is we currently witness that the expansion of the universe is speeding up not slowing down since the 1920s everybody thought that yes the universe is expanding but it will slow down over time why because gravity pulls things back together you throw an Apple upward it doesn't go up faster and faster it goes up slower and slower because the Earth's gravity pulls it back everybody thought that would apply to the universe as a whole it's expanding but expanding ever slower the observations in 1998 culminated in 1998 which won the 2011 Nobel Prize showed that the distant galaxies are moving away ever more quickly the expansion of space is speeding up over time it's accelerating how do we explain that the best explanation we currently have is repulsive gravity we believe even today the universe is suffused with a bath of energy we call it dark energy we believe it's uniformly going through space I like to think of it almost like a as a Turkish sauna it's like the steam filling the sauna of this energy filling space and that repulsive gravity we believe is responsible for the observations that the distant galaxies are rushing away faster and faster over time so it's circumstantial but the case for repulsive gravity is quite strong and what would have caused it to coalesce what would have caused it to compress and initially well yeah why would all that matter be in this tiny yeah less than a pin sized yeah so I have no idea and nobody else on planet Earth has any real idea other but we do have theories and one of the theories suggest that in the very early universe it was a highly chaotic environment very hot with all the fields fluctuating widely up and down and the idea would be that if you wait long enough where it's hard to know what weight means in this environment but don't press me on my definition of time back then just sort of intuitively if you wait long enough on rare occasions the energy will just happen to flatten out in a region become uniform and in that region explosively inflates grows large so you know it's imagine you're looking at a pot of boiling water the surface is of course widely undulating up and down but if you wait long enough very long time since you've never seen it neither have I there will be a little patch on the surface of that boiling water that flattens out why that only means that the water molecules happen for an instant to be moving in just the right way to keep that little patch of water from wildly bubbling it will happen it's rare but if you wait long enough it will occur similarly the widely undulating fields in the early universe if you wait long enough a patch will flatten out you get the uniform energy plug it into Einstein's equations that region explosively inflates and I mean explosively it can go from size that's much less than an atomic diameter to larger than the observable universe in far less than a blink of an eye in 10 to the minus 30 10 to minus 35 seconds that's how powerful repulsive gravity can be that is so baffling yeah so before that before this happens you just have in this theory you just have all of this energy sort of randomly interacting with other energy in the universe with no physical objects yep yep it's just could have been forever that could and in fact that's the main point there's nobody who was hanging around looking at their watch saying good god when is this BIGBANG gonna finally happen you know so so you can have this cosmological pre-show you can have it lasts as long as you like the only thing that you need to happen is that sooner or later our region flattens out and then the cosmological show begins and if we're looking at this model of the universe being this infinite universes yet with different characteristics and different qualities to them this could be happening throughout infinity yeah all over the place yeah and in fact this so-called inflationary cosmology is the technical name for the subject says that it says that it's quite likely that this explosive inflation of the region that we currently inhabit it was just one of many such events and therefore there are other far-flung regions throughout this larger cosmological landscape where things have also inflated but the details can be different the physical details can differ from what we are familiar with and the differences can be small temperature differences in one part of space versus another or they can be far more significant even the the particles that make up that other realm may be different from the particles that make up our realm their masses can be different their charges can be different their fundamental physical features can be different so out there in that wider cosmological landscape it can be the wild wild west of realities and they don't have to worry about protons interior asian there may be realms in which they don't have to worry about protons falling apart the wild the really crazy idea is that if you're very careful mathematically and analyzing these theories you realize that there have to be realms out there that duplicate ours as well many can be different but there have to be versions of this reality that are also instantiate 'add occur out there in other realms so you come to these crazy sounding sci-fi sounding ideas that you and I are having this out there in other distant realms an infinite number of traps infinite number of times and moreover small differences can also arise in these other realms where maybe our positions are interchanged at the table or you know maybe your name is a you know Joe Greene and I'm Brian Rogan or there's like strange realities that can be taken place and this is not an overworked theorists imagination this is the careful dispassionate analysis of the mathematical equations now I should say there are some physicists who see this implication and say whoa you guys have fallen off the deep-end your theory has imploded because any theory that predicts that kind of a wealth of realities that are kind of untestable because they're so far away that we will never interact with them that's the kind of theory that we have been trained to avoid to excise hmm however the more you know forward thinking I'd like to describe us physicists say hey math has proven to be a very valuable guide over the course of hundreds of years and if this is where the math is taking us it's at least worthy of our attention to investigate it fully and possibly come to the conclusion that this is how reality actually behaves Jesus [Applause]

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 4,970,022

Rating: 4.8855176 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: FHAA_1Guxlo

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thorhald33]

This is the first time I’ve heard of or listened to Brian. This guy is awesome 👏🏼

[u/s4xtonh4le]

Being able to communicate these ideas so eloquently in layman's terms shows an outstanding level of knowledge in this subject. There's understanding the subject by yourself, but then there's being able to communicate it to others.

[u/nachodogmtl]

1. Brian Greene is an amazing science educator. Loved him for years and all his previous projects.
2. Props to Joe for letting the man speak without interrupting at all. Lots of interviewers can learn from him.

[u/BrautanGud]

I saw the whole episode earlier today. Brian Greene has a great talent as a communicator. His Ted Talk episodes are enjoyable as well. His latest book also released today!

[u/siic_semper_tyrannis]

For people who like this please please check out the World Science Festival channel in YouTube! It's run by Brian's team and they have tons of great content on there

[u/HardOntologist]

How is this the first time I've heard of the repulsive power of gravity under the right conditions?

[u/Death_Knight1]

I had Brian Greene as my professor last semester for his class "Origins and Meaning" and it was great! It's basically a semester long of him breaking complicated ideas down like this from the beginning of the universe to the end of existence as we know it and the entire in-between. Great guy.

[u/allregshere]

Thanks for sharing. I haven’t seen this episode but I will now. Brian Green is really great at explaining these complex subjects. If anyone is interested, he has a few docu-series on Amazon Prime.

NOVA: The Fabric of the Cosmos. https://watch.amazon.com/detail?asin=B0060C4E90&territory=US&ref_=share_ios_season&r=web

And

Brian Greene Explains the Universe. https://watch.amazon.com/detail?asin=B075LT9JL6&territory=US&ref_=share_ios_season&r=web

[u/krtomasko]

This guy almost never says “um” and never once says “like” to fill his dialogue. I need to be more like, like this guy