[neutralino]

Originally Posted by Tina So the BB was from what to where?

The big bang theory just says that the universe was, at one time in the past, a lot hotter and denser than it is now. It doesn't say how the universe actually started, since we don't know that!

I really find the theoretical explantions of BB very difficult to grasp - but I realise your keen interest/knowledge of Cosmology and link this article in case you did not see it before..... http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04...-in-the-pants/ Because of my leanings towards Electric Universe such anomalies (as seen here regarding background radiation) just reinforce my thinking. This is literal "information paradox" for this article will mean a totally differant thing to you than it does to me.

Well, this article does not, by any stretch of the imagination, rule out the big bang theory; it is merely talking about inflation, and that there are some predictions of inflation that are now seen not to be only made by inflation. So, as the article says, inflation predicts gravitational radiation, but we know now that were we to detect some gravitational radiation it does not immediately mean that we have stone-cold proof for inflation, since other processes can cause gravitational radiation too. However, this does not mean that, even if we detect gravity waves, inflation is wrong. Quite that contrary; we can still use the amount of gravitational radiation (which is measured by some ratio called the "tensor to scalar fraction") to pick between the models of inflation one that predicts this certain value for the tensor-scalar fraction (since different models predict different values) but, as the article says, we are still in search for this "smoking gun" for inflation-- some prediction that, if observed, undoubtedly proves the veracity of inflation.

[dipayankar]

Polybius, it is not that nothing existed before the Big Bang. It is only that we do not know what was there before the singularty and how the singularity came into existance.

Originally Posted by Polybius I just finished watching a doc on Stephen Hawking's paradox - 'information paradox'. It explained how he tried to prove that black holes can die out and disappear from existence along with all the information stored in its infinite singularity. Physics doesn't seem to allow this loss of information. They state that information can never really be ever lost, only harder to retrieve. But what then existed before this universe? Before the Big Bang. I always thought that absolutely nothing existed before it. Not even information. Doesn't that prove that it's possible for information to be destroyed and not to exist at all. Why doesn't physics then allow it?