I think one big problem is that too many people are not ok with the concept of: I don't know

TLDR: A scientist said something salacious and the press ran with it like a Christmas ham under their arm. The more I hear about this type of stuff, the more I think that "separation of press and science" is more important than separation of Church and State.

I am always grateful for ANY person who simply attempts an accurate explanation of what evidence shows THEM…instead of trying to be “sensational” or “all-knowing”…

I saw the Daily Express logo and that answered the question for me.

as someone who just moved to paris, I can confirm "excusez-moi, quel âge a l'univers" is very practical in day to day life

With that constant smirk on Brian Cox's face its clear he knows exacly what happened at the beginning and he is having fun not letting us in on it.

THIS IS ONE EXTREMELY INTELLIGENT WOMAN,,,,KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK SABINE !!!!!

I wish there was a lot more "we don't know" out there instead of "here's how it is". Knowing what we don't know, and the curiosity to fill in the gaps, is what drives the best science.

Sabine will debunk you so hard your high school physics teacher will feel it.

I am a francophone and I perfectly understood what Sabine said in French, so she's a good learner! I wouldn't dream asking her to lose the Teutonic accent. It gives a distinctive twist to her English and we are now used to it, so the same goes with her French. Accents are the last thing one loses when learning a foreign language, if ever.

Express and Dailymail should always be ignored.

SO GLAD that you did post this brave open, honest video, and NO NO NO, it wasn't too much at all. THANK YOU SO MUCH, Sabine.

I think Brian Cox is a very pleasant science communicator to listen to and is generally good at communicating complex ideas simply. He may occasionally be just a bit loose with language, but not to any ridiculous extent. However, he seems to be one of those physicists whose words often get twisted into outrageous headlines by the media and by tabloid science youtube channels. I honestly don't envy him that.

As soon as I saw Daily Express I knew it would be a total lie.

I think you mean hypotheses or speculation and not theory when talking about what happened before the Big Bang. Love your work. Learned so much from you. Thank you!

What an excellent example of a singularity (2:02) that everyone can understand, one of the best I've ever seen I think. Thank you!

for the ignorant in comments: "In addition to their individual work, Cox and Hossenfelder have also collaborated on a number of projects, such as the book "Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe" and the documentary series "The Universe: A Journey Through Space and Time." These collaborations have helped to bridge the gap between theoretical physics and the general public."

As one of my favorite science communicators, Dr. Becky, says, "Space is hard. Words are harder."

that was the best ad incorporated in a video I have ever seen. She actually showed that she's learned some french. awesome

Ah, The Daily Express. That bastion of truth, accuracy and integrity.

I love the fact that CERN labeled the tubes. CERN LHC. Just in case you were lost inside that tunnel at least you know that you're at cern in the large hadron collider.

"infinitely lame" had me replaying that 5 times. you're hilarious, Sabine!

i like that you question main stream science and keep an open mind like a real scientist must due. Nice Job Sabine

Great video with plausible information, thank you. TS

The Daily Express ~ "A right riveting read!" Read ~ "a load of Bollox"

"The smart thing to do would be to just leave it at that. But that's no fun". Well said.

Was it Eddington who said, "Something unknown is doing we don't know what."?

Hearing you speak plausible French is honestly the best endorsement of a sponsor you've ever made.

I wasn't a fan of daily short videos at first, but I think you hit a pretty good sweet spot now in terms of length. If the videos are 5-10 minutes long, I don't mind it as much! It was only at first, when they were 2-4 minutes long and 1 minutes was sponsorship, that it was a bit fragmented :-)

wonderfully clear explanation, thank you

Very clear explanation with examples without unnecessary complications, thank you Sabina

Love the new Q & A Graphic.. May I suggest one of the stills they use of you in the graphic be you holding your head in a hand or both, showing frustration.. 🎉❤ Love love love love love

Yes, because "The Express" is a reliable source of information 🙃

Love your style. So rational . So analytic . Original and enjoyable to watch and understand.

One of my go to science sources . Thank you Sabine

Thinking about the universe hurts my brain and my soul. It's so infinitely beautiful and sad at the same time. The endless mysteries and the fact that we'll never ever scratch the surface of understanding and knowing it.

Thanks Sabine. You are a treasure of sane, educated, thoughtful information. Coated in tasty humour. ❤

Thank you for promoting Babbel, Sabine. You (and your discount deal) have encouraged me to finally start learning French. It's been easier than I expected because Babbel hasn't been picky about my pronunciation.

There's no explaining the dream while you're still in it, kid.

That was a slam dunk debunk 😂 but seriously, I absolutely love what you do Sabine, I love your no-nonsense style

Thanks for this clarification. Brian Cox is not alone in referring to the Reheating following inflation as a Big Bang; IIRC, Ethan Siegel does, too. It is confusing for those of us more accustomed to thinking of inflation following the Big Bang rather than preceding it.

I love the water drop analogy. Stored that one in my backpack.

Hey Sabine, that part you said about singularity arises because we assume space to be smooth and not discrete??? Yeah... that's kinda what Stephen Wolfram has illustrated for us quite elegantly with his method of quantizing space using hypergraphs. He's onto something that turn-of-the-century physicists all assumed to be true (but didn't have the tools to probe).

"According to this theory, out universe is created in a quantum fluctuation in a field called the inflaton." OK, give me a few years to chew that over....

Thank you for the video.

Something I've been thinking of a lot is what if it's not expanding but instead shifting like water. Instead of it having a beginning it just "is" along with all of the stuff within it which tends to gravitate to each other overtime. How it behaves now and how we imagine it could've started seems to have a disconnect. Galaxies collide with each other often and/or move apart, just constantly moving in different directions like a trash pile in an ocean. Gases that also exist in this space gravitate to each other until you get nebulas and the process of creating matter happens on its own. It makes much more sense to me that the universe just always was and the process for creating stars had the by-product of creating other materials. Like we know how stars are made and yet we assume it all happened all at once but also took billions of years before looking like what we understand now. It would be more consistent if the entire process took billions upon billions of years rather than part of it and then BANG

I knew you before i knew brian cox. You have done a better job spreading science and knowledge in my opinion. Thank you ❤

I am just curious. Other than Big Bang, is there any imaginative hypothesis to explain the redshift of Universe?

Well, part of the problem is that 'Big Bang' is a terrible name. At best, it was a super tiny event and there was no 'bang' because there is no air in space. Also, the theory doesn’t adequately explain certain aspects. Why 'Big'? How did the 'Bang' happen? It's like naming a theory 'apple theorem' and then discussing orange juice. Moreover, what kind of theory requires adding 95% of unknown substances to make it work? That's a 20-fold error. It's akin to a child claiming to have two PHDs after the first year of school (the additional 19 being 'dark education'). So, rightfully, people question if the theory's name is wrong, what else could be? If you need to add (fake it to make it ) 95% material to fit observations, it's not science; it's prophecy.That's exactly it. This is precisely why a Priest read the Bible and formulated the Big Bang theory. Just like other observations, such as everything appearing to orbit around us, leading to the belief that we are at the center of the universe.. It's astonishing that people still refer to observations as facts, much like those who claim the Earth is flat because, based on limited observations, the horizon appears flat. The Big Bang theorists are, at best, like divorce scientists who conclude the main reason for divorce is marriage based on observations alone. Without mathematics, it's not science; it's philosophical speculation. Mathematics clearly shows that 5 does not equal 100, and it's time to abandon such religious-like beliefs and seek better theories.

Bravo Sabine, ton Francais est tres bien prononcé et facile à comprendre😊 comme tes vidéos

All this inflation story sounds like nonsense. Cosmology in general took a huge blow from the JWT deployment. Decades of speculation invalidated by a few months of data from a single machine has got to be embarrassing.

As soon as I saw that the headline was from The Express I knew where this was going 😉

The phone should have rung in the first 10 seconds. 😂

Every time a watch one of Sabines videos I struggle to keep up, I'm just an average gut trying to learn something new. So for all of you out there that understand all the information, respect !

Very well done clarification

Thank you for sharing your time and work Sabine, if a caveman such as myself can get something from this, and I can, so great job communicating effectively, peace

"We don't know." So much more satisfying than, "Your question has no meaning," which I have heard supposed experts say.

Sabine is the physics teacher I knew I always needed, and now I get to hear her.... truly a remarkable universe

I asked GOOGLE's Bard, and here's what it said: The concept of "before" the Big Bang might not even be meaningful in the traditional sense. Time itself is thought to have begun with the Big Bang, so talking about what happened "before" is like trying to describe what's north of the North Pole. Our understanding of physics is constantly evolving, and it's possible that new discoveries in the future could shed light on what happened before the Big Bang. So, while we may not have a definitive answer to your question yet, the quest to understand the origins of the universe is one of the most fascinating and challenging in all of science. And who knows, maybe someday we will be able to crack this cosmic mystery!

I think the two most current theories of which I'm aware are by Laura Mersini-Houghton (author of Before The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond, July 2022), who proposes that our universe is part of a multiverse created when the cosmic wave function resolved at different energy points across a string theory "landscape" - and the other by Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking (author of On The Origin of Time, 2023) which proposes that the universe resolved from a quantum state due to our observing it backwards in time (given that by Einstein's equations the arrow of time is bidirectional). At least, I think I understand these two theories that way. Each has given a presentation on their theory at the Royal Institute as well (one can find the videos on KZfaq). I would be very interested in Sabine's take on both of them.

I love the way the analogy of the water drop was used, where the drop tapers to infinity, yet the actual source, the tap, is in plain sight. 🤣

Great video! Keep up the good work. Also, Babbel only has 14 languages available at the moment :(

As we are finite, our perception is constrained by our very narrow frame of reference, we live, and we die, and through this, we may forever struggle with the concept of eternity.

It's inherent in science to ask "What caused that?', but perhaps somethings were always there and will continue to be forever.

“Well, that’s no fun!” Is the thought before every physics theory.

"infinitely lame" i can't stop laughing!!!

Those theories always remind me of the stuff I made up as a kid to explain my lego spaceships that I built while watching animated series. "This is infinity fast, so everything that goes faster than it uses atomic energy magic to convert infinity into more speed, like it's two times infinity now."

What a banger of a video Sabine 🎉

One of my favorite Brian Cox quotes (at least I think it was him) is “Nothing doesn’t like to exist.” (in response to the question of why is there something instead of nothing).

Over the past year I've noticed a disturbing trend on KZfaq; videos are being put out which appear to be essentially clickbait. The title will include some prominent name (Cox, Musk et. al.) and the content is revealed to be a miasma of speculation, pseudo-scientific nonsense and often with only a brief mention of the headline act. My wife watched one yesterday on Oumuamua which was total rubbish - I heard every word while doing a crossword in another room. I also think some of this stuff is being generated by an AI and I think that particular one was one of them. Point is, one needs to hone one's b.s. detector these days. I now ignore videos which I can readily identify as garbage.

Off-topic, but hopefully appropriate. This channel is awesome!

Time for a shout out to the physicist who came up with the Big Bang theory in 1927. The physicist was George LeMaitre, who was a friendly acquaintance of Einstein. Also, the fact that blows many people's minds and irritates them to no end is that LeMaitre was a Catholic priest for most of his adult life until his death in 1966.

I love how she properly writes sponsors into the video script, almost as rare on KZfaq as her honesty

Brian Cox has this air of mysticism that really, really made me appreciate KZfaq and the regular scientists communicating on there.

You're amazing, Sabine.

I am glad Dr Hossenflelder and her team, are here to put things in perspective. We just don't know, a refreshing disclosure. However that is no reason not to come up with alternatives and theories, which Dr Hossenfelder mentions.

Sabine, I have not understood why you say that eternal inflation must also have had a beginning at some finite time in the past. My understanding of this theory is quite limited, but what I get is that it should, on large scales (much larger than any individual universes), more or less resemble a de Sitter model (spatially flat with Omega_Lambda = 1). Under these conditions the expansion law is a pure and simple exponential, it does not admit any beginning or singularity and more in general there is nothing special about any point in time.

A few years back I commented on a video regarding a similar topic and said that from what I can observe, everything around us is some sort of oscillation or waveform. So why shouldn't what we call universe be a cyclic expansion and collapse? I got laughed at and I still can't explain why I think that other than my observations of daily life.

Very interesting Sabine. A quick question: As space expands into the universe, could there be galaxies that are so far away from us, so their light would never reach us?

Good explanation!

If you’re going to Paris, can I suggest you memorise; ‘Excusez-moi, pouvez-vous déplacer votre tracteur’, you may need it!

My dad was a very intelligent fellow. His mind was well beyond his education and he often got a huge amount of disrespect from well educated idiots. (Yes. I'm bitter.) One day I told him that I figured out what came in the moments before 'The Big Bang.' 'The Big Click'

Talking of language, many people seem to equate debunking with disproof. Alternative theories are neither of those things. Debunking is merely a process of removing noise, demonstrating that certain evidence is not valid. As you say, this usually just takes us back to the position of not knowing. People seem to hate admitting they don't know.

Love how Sabine smoothly segues from Brian Cox to language to Babel.

My theory: Before the universe, there was Nothing... and then Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked Nothing in the face and told it to get a job.

I love Brian Cox, he was amazing in Succession! 😜

Cosmology has always made my head hurt.

Thanks Sabine. Always appreciate your efforts :) Hartle-Hawking state: I find this interesting as I had never encountered it previously. > Here is the interesting difference in what I keep jabbering about: (Condensed description from wikip...) > According to the Hartle-Hawking proposal, the *universe has no origin* as we would understand it: before the Big Bang, which happened about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a *singularity in both space and time.* Hartle and Hawking suggest that if we could travel backwards in time towards the beginning of the universe, we would note that quite near what might have been the beginning, *time gives way to space so that there is only space and no time.[3]* > Now here is where my speculation differs: I would be inclined to say that "... , space gives way to time so that there is only time and no space." Although this is not completely the correct wording for me. > I would more inclined to say: "... , space gives way to time and the void so that there is only time-void and no space, then ultimately at 0 time the void is infinitely small or does not exist at all." Putting this back in forward motion: Time has no physical properties at 0 time, and as such does not have to exist in some infinite 4D void, or anywhere at all. 0 Time exist nowhere. What triggers time to begin I can't speculate, but once it does it progresses at it's maximum speed from that imaginary 0 center. The moment time begins the 3D void is created in the wake of times event horizon. There is no "measurable space" as all we have is the void. (Later when there is space, objects and distance; If an imaginary observer attempted to look for the event horizon they may never reach or see it due the speed limits of the time-void. It will always being distance ahead ahead and appear infinite, even though the progression of time would have an event horizon (technically not infinite, but progressing toward an unknown or even infinite place in time). From here the "tension" or "potential" from time (void) stretching could emerge as the primal energy of what could now be loosely referred to as measurable space. Maybe the sudden burst of energy could occur after time has been progressing for a period that the energy emerged suddenly across a large expanse of the void giving the impression of something like a Big Bang and a sudden expanse of space in the void. > So I really only differ in that I give "time" primacy over the void even though time and the void are inseparable and both begin at 0 time, rather than giving an infinite void primacy over time (as we do now and can't explain where the infinite void came from). > > Yes I know, I am not a physicist and this is nothing more than wild speculation :)

Oh I hate it when journalists sensationalise basic analogies or hypotheticals into literal things

of all the theories for what happened before the big bang, eternal inflation is the most pleasing to my brain. Would be interesting to know if it could ever be verified through observation?

I spent many years of my young life passionately studying mathematical physics at university. I considered it as THE best way to understand the universe. Now I just find what it produces embarrassing...

Without my hearing aids, I thought you said "Observations tell us that the universe is pants."

"Take a super simple example of a singularity". No, I don't think I will. Not with my brain.

1:40 I've never before heard anyone explain the big bang using this equation before, that's great

Sabine’s chair - in the advert at the end of the video 8:20 - looks extremely comfortable. Where can we buy this excellent chair? Someone ask Frau Hasenpfeffer, please!

... At what point did Brian Cox mention the " Creation Story " as an explanation ? ... he used the word " creation ' in a neutral and non religious fashion - no " God " was mentioned. And so far as the idea of NOT KNOWING is concerned, of course we DON'T KNOW ! ... Science is the study of unknown things, and an attempt to make sense of them. And this is the BIG difference between Science and Religion : Science DOESN'T know, but TRIES to, Religion Doesn't KNOW either, but tries to PRETEND to ! ...

In one of the Dr Who audio plays the Big Bang was simply a misfire of an alien spaceship firing up its engines creating our universe.

Thank you. I’m not scientific, but I enjoy listening to you.

Of course there was a "before" before the big bang, another one in fact, even larger. The Rolling Stones said so with their "Bigger Bang" album, and everyone knows those guys predate the universe by far.

it is not that we do not know... it is that we aren't sure neither if the question is well formulated.