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Comment by aswanson | Hacker News Reader

There is no proof of "nothing " existing. Every observation we take, we see "something".

Than why do we need a beginning if there was always something.

There is as yet no proof that there was nothing before the big bang, it's just a supposition. The hot dense universe definitely happened but whether that was the "beginning" is essentially unknown.

For the same reason the mind seeks for an ending if there is something. It’s the environment our little neural nets trained in.

We don't. There was never nothing, because there is no "before" the big bang. Time as we know it did not exist until the big bang. It's not there was nothing, it's that there was no there or then.

We don't need it, the same way we don't "need" scientific proof about anything. We could live our whole life pleasing the stakeholders and be happy about it

My lay interpretation of this theory is that it says there was no beginning.

But a cycling of a previous universe.

I was a little unclear on the ending, where he says this theory would place our entire universe "inside" a black hole of a parent universe.

All in all, it does seem to tie up some loose ends, and suggest some order to what previously required speculation.

"beginning" is a misnomer, since time itself started with the Big Bang. There is no such thing as "before" the singularity, as time and space were curved together.

Time is a map of the states of consciousness, I believe consciousness/awareness of the universe has no beginning just infinite layers of abstraction.

This is meaningless technobabble.

I'm happy you feel that way

There are many theories that portray time as existing before the big bang.

Well, do the calculations of how long it takes for all mass to move around in the initial moments of the big bang. You'll realize that the closer one gets to the singularity, the slower time passes due to time dilation, which means that you'll get the whole eternity to reach the singularity. It only looks like a few seconds from our point of view, looking at the big bang.

Strictly speaking, modern cosmology does not treat the Big Bang as the beginning of all of existence, it's what happens when you take observations about large scale cosmology and run them backwards in time.

Based on the information we have available about our universe, we can't make predictions or formally model anything prior to a certain point in time, consequently it's convenient to treat this moment as the earliest point in time in which physics as we know it makes any sense. So while there may have been some kind of existence prior to the Big Bang, we have no way to make sense of it even at a conceptual level. Given that, we may as well treat this special point in time as the beginning of the universe as we understand it and can explain it using physics, as opposed to some absolute beginning of all of existence.

Thank you for your insightful response.

We don't. We never see the "beginning" of anything. All we observe is things that are already here changing.

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