If Time is, as Julian Barbour postulates, not a fundamental component of physics, but an illusion created by relative configuration of matter that embed history (as in, memories in brains, fossils in the soil, …), then “What happened before the big bang?” doesn’t have any more meaning than “What happens before the beginning of a book?” or “What is north of the north pole?”.
If configuration space just is (not “always” because time doesn’t exist at the level of configuration space, only inside individual configuration), and the Big Bang is just an edge of it, it doesn’t have any meaning to ask “What happened before the big bang?” as it doesn’t make any sense to ask what lies beyond the corner of the pyramid in triangle land.
Nitpick: “What happens before the beginning of a book?” is actually a meaningful question, or else prequels would have a hard time existing.
As before, though, I understand that “before the big bang” doesn’t actually make sense, but then saying “it doesn’t make sense” or “it’s like trying to guess what’s north of the north pole” are, respectively, a teacher’s password and an analogy. Passwords are useless, and analogies help in understanding only if an institutive intuition is already there. As an analogy, I’d say that an analogy only helps propagate an already held belief through a shoddy barely-Bayesian belief network. (In fact, that’s good. I should keep that.)
Your comment is helpful, though. I think, now, that I’ve framed the problem enough that it will slowly dissolve on its own. (This is a question of my own psychology and not one of underlying reality, after all.) It still feels strange, though, at the moment… though it does look increasingly likely that I’m confusing “time before the big bang” with “what caused the big bang”, which, if I understand correctly, is a much harder problem.
If Time is, as Julian Barbour postulates, not a fundamental component of physics, but an illusion created by relative configuration of matter that embed history (as in, memories in brains, fossils in the soil, …), then “What happened before the big bang?” doesn’t have any more meaning than “What happens before the beginning of a book?” or “What is north of the north pole?”.
If configuration space just is (not “always” because time doesn’t exist at the level of configuration space, only inside individual configuration), and the Big Bang is just an edge of it, it doesn’t have any meaning to ask “What happened before the big bang?” as it doesn’t make any sense to ask what lies beyond the corner of the pyramid in triangle land.
Nitpick: “What happens before the beginning of a book?” is actually a meaningful question, or else prequels would have a hard time existing.
As before, though, I understand that “before the big bang” doesn’t actually make sense, but then saying “it doesn’t make sense” or “it’s like trying to guess what’s north of the north pole” are, respectively, a teacher’s password and an analogy. Passwords are useless, and analogies help in understanding only if an institutive intuition is already there. As an analogy, I’d say that an analogy only helps propagate an already held belief through a shoddy barely-Bayesian belief network. (In fact, that’s good. I should keep that.)
Your comment is helpful, though. I think, now, that I’ve framed the problem enough that it will slowly dissolve on its own. (This is a question of my own psychology and not one of underlying reality, after all.) It still feels strange, though, at the moment… though it does look increasingly likely that I’m confusing “time before the big bang” with “what caused the big bang”, which, if I understand correctly, is a much harder problem.