Matter

If matter cannot be created nor destroyed, then what was matter before the big bang?

Kill yourself and ask God

Matter can be created and destroyed.

uh...no it cant

>>3
>>4
Matter can be created and destroyed. But the sum total of mass and  energy is always constant.

Conservation of mass in the theory of special relativity depends on the definition of mass/matter used. In modern physics, mass and matter are equivalent to energy, and thus the conservation of energy (which always holds) encompasses matter and energy.

"Matter" (not including many types of energy) is generally not conserved in special relativity.

I hope that all you queers realize that in a Godel-ian fashion, since our universe acts like a black hole, it's simply improbable (if not outrightly impossible) to have knowledge of what's "outside" of it regardless of the era desired.

Now it's time for you all to get back to debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or the weight of a rock that God makes that's so heavy that even he can't lift it.

I swear.  The state of (un)education in America today.

>>7
While America is pretty bad, you can't just assume that any of the people in this thread are Americans.  There are idiots all over the world, and people from many different countries use 4chan.

>>8
You tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at nights.

>>9
I completely agree that my fellow Americans are morons, but >>7's assumptions don't make him any more intelligent than the average American.

uhm your answer is here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible

anon delivers!

#10, I don't need to be significantly more intelligent.  Like the joke about the two guys and the pursuing tiger, I only need to be smarter than the guy next to me.  In America, this really isn't difficult ... since as you demonstrated, public dismissals have largely replaced critical thinking.

At any rate, the observation stands, regardless of the merit of the individual who generated it.  Thank you, #10, for your standard American dismissal method.  MiniTrue would be proud, and I'm sure an extra chocolate bar will be in your ration pack this week for your dutiful service to the state.

Okay, so matter has always existed, and the big bang simply added a fuck load of energy and "rearranged" it as we know it now, right?

Maybe, maybe not. Also, "since our universe acts like a black hole"? Since when did black holes expand at an expotential rate?

#14, you should read up on the cosmological literature of the last generation.  Physicists have performed rational calculations which indicate that the entire universe can be a black hole, and after all, we live inside an event horizon past which we cannot escape.

More modern treatments of black holes are suggesting a condensate explanation which would obsolete such a view, of course.  Black holes might not be crushed out of our universe and might just be an extremely dense form of matter (hence the condensate).

Matter has always existed. The big bang was just a collection of it in a singularity that suddenly exploded outward

If the Primordial Nut that produced the Big Bang was a singularity, then really little has changed from the singularity viewpoint.  We are still in a singularity, and are unable to see outside of the universe.  The spacetime and matter we are (and are in) has expanded remarkably, cooled immensely, and has probably changed state many times in the interim, but largely it's still a lump of dirty spacetime and we can't get out.

Luckily for us, we've plenty to do in our lump, and we can keep ourselves busy for the next 100 billion years before entropy produces some real problems.  We don't need to leave our lump.

1 trillion years from now, there are going to be some rather desperate electromagnetic entities in our universe, as the Great Cooling drops the floor out from under their survival.  The universe will likely become a vast and expanding graveyard.  If the recently formulated acceleration theory is correct, there will be a very real endpoint, as spacetime itself will stretch out in increasing virtual velocity and eventually tear any remaining particles from every other remaining particles.  Literally, all remaining matter will dissociate.  In the long and dark pathway down to Eternity, entire universes of spacetime will erupt between particles, then between each other, endlessly.

As far as I understand that theory, nothing extradimensional need occur.  But our universe will become a superspace of space, where each point effectively becomes an empty universe (although not an actual singularity), and then each point in that becomes another empty universe, ad infinitum.  Endless acceleration of spacetime expansion can only produce that evergoing result.

It's interesting to contemplate such Final Armageddons.

The universe is expanding outward from a central location. We are still caught in the force from the big bang. Not only that, but the speed at which the universe is expanding is accelerating. We're traveling forward at an incredible rate. This traveling forward at an incredible rate is the only thing keeping all of the energy (and matter for that... matter) from expending its energy in mere moments - when things move quickly they "age" slower. Eventually the universal expansion will slow and then stop. After it stops it'll all pull back inward, because of inertia, and it'll all collect once again into a single point and then we'll have another big bang. As far as we know this could have happened a trillion times over... or once. Who knows. Anyway, I think it's neat. Go universe.

Aaron, you can say that there is a central location, but if the accepted model of the universe is correct, that centrality is extradimensional to ourselves.  Within the universe, there is no central location of the expansion.  The simple balloon model is a good way to visualize what's going on ... if our spacetime is the surface of a balloon, then as the balloon expands all points get farther away from each other.  The central point of the expansion is at the center of the balloon, which is extradimensional to the balloon's surface.

Secondly, your slow-aging argument doesn't fit.  According to the balloon model, matter is not actually moving.  The spacetime itself is expanding and just happens to carry along matter along with it.  There is a certain disconnection between the spacetime and the matter embedded in it, since as the universe expands, matter within tends to separate but does NOT dissociate.

Since the expansion of the universe is slinging distant galaxies away from us, but they are not actually moving, then we have to speculate if spacetime "speed" is subject to the effects of relativity.  There's no reason to suspect that that is so.

If the acceleration of the universe is true, and it simply continues, then the universe will turn into the empty superspace as I related before.  Eventually (yeah, like in 10^(10^10) years) all matter will dissolve by one means or another, so the spacetime dissociation of matter I proposed above won't be necessary to produce the final empty superspace.

Does space itself undergo decay in the very long term?

#20, that's a great question.  We can approach that in two ways.

One way is to define "decay" as "change".  Acceptable theories of cosmological expansion use the concept of "phase change" for spacetime, in which the very nature of spacetime changes state.  In one example, the strong nuclear force decoupled from the rest of the basic forces in the early aftermath of the Big Bang.

Phase changes in spacetime haven't occurred in billions of years, and all of them seem to have been artifacts of the close aftermath of the Big Bang.  There just don't seem to be any more forces that need to decouple from the others.  HOWEVER, it's not known if the current universe is in it's "final" state.  We might have another phase change coming as spacetime gets flatter.  If such a change is coming, it will be as catastrophic as all the others were, in that structures in the current spacetime will be universally disrupted to form the new spacetime and matter within it that conforms to the new rules.

Another way to define your "decay" is just that ... does spacetime itself decay to a lesser form (either due to time or the imagined stress of continued expansion)?  After all my readings, I've never heard such a question uttered.  I have no idea.

How do we even approach testing of the integrity of spacetime over varying conditions?  The only spacetime "weakness" I know of is the possibility of being "pierced" (or at least steeply warped) by the presence of a black hole.

Past that point, I also don't know what degraded spacetime even looks like in any sense of the world "look".

I'm feeling really keen, for some of that good ol' green

Marijuana MUST be legalized.

I wants lots and lots of some delectable pot!

Marijuana MUST be legalized.