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Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

Scientific approach to the matter is actually simple: its scientifically impossible to research state before the big bang because no information from before original singularity is available. This makes question non-scientific.

We have wiggle room for planck epoch because that time was after singularity, meaning that we have information from that time (however little of it is left).

Closest we got to science here is by extending the time and space axis across the diagrams point of origin. This is where idea of singularity being in heart of higher level universe black hole (or past universe’s collapse) comes from. Its inpossible to verify black hole idea due to deletion of information, but collapse/crunch should be observable in distant future of the universe. Perhaps dark energy still has some tricks up its sleeve?

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Roger Penrose disagrees, and it's possible he and some of his colleagues have identified circular features in the CMB which may have survived from a previous eon. The scientific approach is to keep an open mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology#Emp...

I truly dyslike when somebody uses that particular phrase, because it frames other participant as somehow close minded.

The fact that Penrose’s work is possible and ongoing is proof enough that scientific discourse on the matter is open and possible.

Well, you did try and close a door to a possibility. And you tried to frame that as being “scientific”. Yet, you cannot prove it.

Science never has final say on what’s impossible. Until (if ever) we have a grand unified theory that perfectly coheres all we find and ever find, you cannot claim to know of an impossibility.

For example, an easy proof you’re wrong would be simulation theories. In that case, the Big Bang is just a sub-simulation inside a bigger universe. Can you prove we aren’t in a simulation? If not, then you cannot make any claim about how it’s not scientific to talk about before the Big Bang. We just don’t know, so taking the positive is an error.

> Can you prove we aren’t in a simulation?

In context of scientific debate, no Simulation theory exists. Only hipothesis, and a very weak one, considered it’s not falsifiable. Hence its treatment as curiosity and thought experiment by scientific community.

Your hypothesis needs to meet some requirements in order to be scientifically viable to research. You cannot throw out scientific method out of window because it appears „close-minded” to you.

Until proof appears that singularity is not errasing information, scientific approach is to find a proof that there’s no singularity as threshold between old and new universe within a cycle. And argument for that is currently based on interpretation of some features pf cosmic background, which is scientifically debated.

There are definite ways to test for versions of simulations, but the point is thinking outside the box and then working your way back to scientific hypothesis you can test is the scientific process. You could make many testable predictions based on many different simulated universe hypothesis. Not to get even stuck on one example, my point was general that we cant know there aren't wildly unintuitive universe structures.

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