"Phase Change" hypothesis

[Twilightdance]

Then, I have no clue how the physicists ended up converting the math into linguistic sentences like the following from the OP article:



(especially, if as you claim that it is universally acknowledged that time is a mental construct, what do the emphasized terms in the quote above even mean?)

In all seriousness you can pose this question to a theoritical physicist - "Ask Sam Harris anything" is a good place. He is not a physicist but surely he can get the acceptable answer from other leading scientists for us.

I believe it is purely a need to communicate ideas to general public and the general scientific "journalism" around it, so not much effort has been put in proper articulation of the statements.

Does the above mean that 14 billion years prior to today, the universe did not exist?

It means, the Universe as we know it with space-"time" & gravity etc. did not exist, I would think. I saw in Discovery Science not all physicist like this, but we should let maths and actual evidence to sort that out. So in physics, apparently whether time can exist independently [infinite time] or is exist only in the space time and thus has beginning [like in big bang or this new theory] is still an open question.

But what you have been pointing out is merely a difficulty with natural the language while articulating "beginning" of time. It could be just be a problem of self-reference as we are talking about time of time.

I thought we can use a meta-time concept to deal with it, but now I realized this problem may go away if one takes time as a measurement from the present. There is no absolute need to measure beginning of the universe/time @ the beginning of the universe, is there? Take your reference frame from now, the present, then even the English language can admit a finite time with its beginning or an infinite time, whatever suits. No? Lets just talk about "past in the present", why talk "past in past in present" and forcing a self reference?

[wundermonk]

It means, the Universe as we know it with space-"time" & gravity etc. did not exist, I would think.

I think this is key - "as we know it". Some physicists like Lawrence Krauss go on to claim that the universe arose from "nothing". Now, when probed on what this "nothing" means, they end up saying that it is actually vacuum or void or some such entity. Now, clearly, a vacuum or a void is not nothing. If I know the Big Bang properly, the understanding of "nothing" [or whether it can even be called "nothing"] out of which the universe supposedly arose has been notoriously difficult to get a grip on even scientifically because even the math/physics of the Big Bang [BB] do NOT make a claim on what came before. The math/physics simply break down at that point. Should we then take it to mean that the BB actually claims that the universe arose from "nothing"? Does this "nothing" have any properties/form/attributes? All these are possibly unknowable. In fact, the BB only talks of the development of the universe from [13.7 Billion years - Planck Time] years time ago. It specifically makes NO CLAIM whatsoever on what came before the BB or what, if anything, caused it. So, IMHO, physicists who claim the universe "began to exist" or was created "out of nothing" should either

(1)define those terms properly, or even better,
(2)not use linguistic parlance at all to try and articulate what their math seems to indicate to the general audience.

But what you have been pointing out is merely a difficulty with natural the language while articulating "beginning" of time.

Given that the BB specifically makes no claim whatsoever as to what caused it or why it happened, etc. I think there is no need to even talk of stuff like the "beginning" of time.

It could be just be a problem of self-reference as we are talking about time of time.

The question here is why postulate a self-reference or a meta-time concept? Does that even make sense? From what little I know about the equations of quantum physics, Maxwell equations, etc., there is only one variable representing time, t.

There is no absolute need to measure beginning of the universe/time @ the beginning of the universe, is there?

And my point is that the universe/time can not begin to exist. For ANYTHING to begin, there must be a point in time when it did not exist, followed temporally by another point in time when it did exist. This is the only way the verb begin even makes sense. And this is not just a linguistic/semantic issue.

For instance, let us take what the authors of the study in the OP state:

the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time,

It appears that the authors are suggesting that there was a point in time, t1 when there was an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water. Then, at a later time t2, this universe crystallized to form 4D space-time. Now, an obvious question which I am sure even a fellow-scientist/physicist would want to know is, what does it mean to state that at time t2, 4D space-time emerged? If space and time emerged only at t2, what does the prior time t1 refer to? Is that not another point in time? Where was this "amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water" present if there was no space?