What was the universe like before the Big Bang?

According to modern cosmology, our universe was born about 13.7 billion years ago, and everything, even space and time, is a product of the Big Bang. But was there nothing before the Big Bang? Science Studies researcher Erfan Kasraei has taken a look at this question.

Lord Kelvin, the great physicist in the mid-19th century, estimated the age of the Earth to be between 24 and 400 million years. Although Kelvin’s calculation is far from the actual age of the Earth that we know today (about four and a half billion years), we should not forget that Kelvin’s proposed estimate was a great scientific achievement at a time when the general idea of the age of the Earth, based on the religious teachings of the Bible, was about 6,000 years.

It should also be noted that physicists at that time knew nothing about radioactivity, and Kelvin arrived at this number based on the laws of thermodynamics and on the assumption that today’s Earth was once a hot ball that gradually cooled.

In addition to calculating the age of the Earth, calculating the age of the universe itself became possible only in the last century, with the advent of modern cosmology and the discovery of the expansion of the universe. A calculation and estimate that is still not accurate after decades and has a lot of uncertainty.

According to the initial estimates of Edwin Hubble, the scientist who discovered the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang occurred about 1.5 billion years ago. This estimate was highly suspect from the very beginning. Because it did not match the age of the Earth estimated through geological calculations, and in other words, geologists knew that the Earth was older than 3 billion years. Therefore, the Earth could not be older than the universe itself and there was no doubt that something was wrong.

Until about two decades ago, that is, before 1999, scientists estimated the age of the universe to be between 7 and 20 billion years. Today, based on the latest cosmological calculations, we know that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, or about 436,117,076,600,000,000 seconds old.

However, even 13.7 billion years is not the exact and final number for the age of the universe, and this number may be tens of millions of years less or more. But regardless of uncertainties due to the limitations of today's technologies or even calculation errors, what cosmology knows today is that our universe, that is, the very universe in which we live and which consists of about 2 trillion galaxies, had a beginning. Our universe was born in an event called the Big Bang, and if we go back in time, we reach a day when there is no yesterday.

In his introduction to Alan Gutt's book The Inflationary Universe, American physicist Alan Lightman considers a cultural aspect to cosmology beyond the scientific aspects, writing: "Every culture has its own cosmology, in other words, its own narrative of how the universe came into being, what it is made of, and where it is going."

The fact is that large parts of modern cosmology, despite the technical and computational complexities that only cosmologists and physicists can fathom, in some ways resemble myths and historical legends.

For example, this cosmological theory that there is an eternal and eternal cycle in which the universe is constantly created and destroyed, if it were not accompanied by mathematical symbols and equations and complex physical concepts, would probably look similar to the myths of the creation of the universe in Greek and Chinese cultures or the paintings and drawings of Arzhang Mani about the formation of the universe and the structure of the universe and the end and resurrection of the universe.

In the book The Inflationary Universe, Alan Gut himself seeks to find an answer to the question of whether other Big Bangs are constantly occurring in the distant reaches of the universe or whether it is possible that super-advanced civilizations have recreated the Big Bang? These are just some of the questions whose understanding is beyond the limits of human imagination, logic, and reasoning.

According to Alan Gutt's inflationary model, which is a key part of the Standard Model of Cosmology, the universe expanded from the size of a proton to the size of a grapefruit in a fraction of a second after its birth. However, we will never know for sure whether this actually happened. Although the theory of cosmic inflation makes accurate predictions about the universe today, it does not mean that cosmic inflation has been proven in the early universe.

One scientist who disagrees with the inflationary theory of the universe is Roger Penrose, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. According to Penrose, if we abandon inflationary theory, we must have something that can explain the expansion of the universe. Penrose says that our universe is the future and the end of an era or, as he puts it, a previous aeon, and the reason for the current uniformity in our universe should actually be sought before the Big Bang and in the universe before the Big Bang.

In his view, every Big Bang is the beginning of a new era and our universe is just one link in a chain, and before and after it, other universes have existed or will exist. That our universe is the fruit of a previous universe and a legacy of a universe before the Big Bang has also been proposed by cosmologists such as Abhay Ishtkar in the form of a theory called loop quantum gravity (LQC), according to which everything goes back to a time before the Big Bang; in other words, to a universe similar to ours, with the difference that this previous universe was contracting instead of expanding.

Gadget News/One of the fundamental questions in cosmology is what happened before the Big Bang? Let's review some new theories about the Big Bang.

My idea is that nothing comes from nothing. For something to exist, there must be some matter or component available, and for them to exist, something else must be available! Now my question is: where did the matter that created the Big Bang or Big Bang come from, and what happened at this point to create it?

Brian Cox, a physicist who warned on the BBC Universe program: "The last star will slowly cool and fade away. After that, the universe will become a void once again; a world without light, life or meaning."

Before the Big Bang and its theories

The disappearance of the last star will be the beginning of an infinitely long and dark period. All matter in the universe is swallowed up by supermassive black holes, which in turn evaporate into nothingness. Space will continue to expand outward until that glimmer of light expands to interact further. Then all activity ceases.

Was that strange enough? Some cosmologists believe that a dark, cold universe, such as the one we have in the distant future, could have been the source of our own Big Bang.

Issue 1: Before we answer the question of this article, let’s take a look at “physical matter.” If we are to explain the origin of stable matter made of atoms and molecules, none of these things would have existed at the Big Bang or for hundreds of thousands of years after.

We now have a precise understanding of the process by which atoms are formed from simpler particles, and we know that they were formed when the universe cooled enough for more complex matter to become stable. We also know how these atoms later evolved into heavier elements and settled into stars.

But understanding this doesn’t answer the question of whether something came from nothing. So let’s think back much further. The first long-lived particles of matter were protons and neutrons, which together make up the nuclei of atoms. These particles came into existence just a ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. Before that turning point, there was literally no matter. But physics allows us to go back in time. (Back to physical processes that existed before any matter existed.)

Physics leads us to the theory of the “Grand Unity.” We are now properly in theoretical physics because we cannot generate enough power in our experiments to study the processes that were going on at that time, and we have to rely on theories.

The first plausible hypothesis is that the physical universe was formed from a short-lived “fundamental soup” (a term coined by one scientist to explain the origin of life on Earth) of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

At that time, both matter and antimatter existed in roughly equal amounts: each type of matter, like a quark, had an antimatter or “mirror image” that was almost identical to itself, differing only by a degree. However, matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they collide; in other words, these particles are constantly being created and destroyed.

But the question is, how did these particles come into being in the first place? Quantum field theory tells us that even in a vacuum, where space-time is apparently devoid of any energy, physical activity takes the form of energy fluctuations. These fluctuations can lead to the emission of particles that disappear shortly after. This might sound like a mathematical mystery rather than real physics, but such particles have been seen in countless experiments.

In other words, the vacuum of space-time is constantly churning, with particles constantly being created and destroyed from nothing. But perhaps all this is really telling us is that the quantum vacuum (despite its name) is more than just “nothing.”

Now suppose we ask: Where did space-time itself come from? Now we can turn back the clock to the ancient Planck era, a period in the early history of the universe when our best physical theories are violated. This period occurred just a ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

At this point, both space and time were subject to quantum fluctuations. Physicists usually deal separately with quantum mechanics, which governs the world of tiny particles, and general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales. But to fully understand the Planck era, we need a complete theory, such as quantum gravity, to unify the two.

We don’t yet have a complete theory of quantum gravity, but there have been attempts at it, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity. In these attempts, space and time usually appear like ripples on the surface of a deep ocean.

What we experience as space and time is the product of quantum processes operating at a deeper, microscopic level, and these processes have no particular meaning to us as beings rooted in the macroscopic world.

In the Planck era, our understanding of space and time is destroyed, so we can no longer rely on our understanding of cause and effect. Yet all candidate theories of quantum gravity describe something that is happening in the Planck era. But where does this come from?

Even if causality were not to apply in any other way, it would still be possible to explain one component of the Planck era in terms of another. Unfortunately, even the best laws of physics are not yet able to provide an answer. Until we move towards a “theory of everything,” we will not be able to answer this question definitively.

The best answer we can say with certainty at this point is that physics has not yet found a confirmed example of something coming from nothing. To truly answer the question of how something could come from nothing, we would have to explain the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of the Planck era.

But ultimately all attempts to answer this question remain speculative. Some of them point to supernatural forces, such as a designer. Other explanations remain within the realm of physics. (Like a multiverse that includes an infinite number of parallel universes, or models of the universe's cycle that are born over and over again.)

Roger Penrose, the 2020 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has proposed an intriguing but controversial model for a cyclical universe (any cosmological model in which the universe follows infinite or indefinite cycles is called a cyclical model) called "coherent cyclical cosmology."

Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a hot, dense, and small state of the universe—as it was at the Big Bang—and a very cold, empty, and expanding state of the universe—as it will be in the distant future. According to Penrose's fundamental theory, the two states become identical when they reach their final limits. Although this theory may seem contradictory, the complete absence of matter could account for all the matter we see around us.

In this view, the Big Bang came about almost out of nothing. This nothingness is the result of the vacuum of matter in the universe being swallowed up by black holes, which then themselves turned into photons in the vacuum and then disappeared. So the entire universe came from something that is almost exactly the same as the nothingness we are talking about. But this “nothing” is in its own way “something”. It is in fact a physical universe, even if it is empty.

How is it possible that this state is, from one perspective, a cold and empty universe and from another perspective, a dense and hot universe? The answer lies in a complex mathematical procedure called “equivalent scaling”, a geometric transformation that actually changes the size of an object but leaves its shape unchanged.

Penrose showed how a cold dense state and a hot dense state could be related by such a rescaling, so that they correspond in the shape of their spacetimes – though not in their sizes. It is certainly difficult to understand how two objects can be identified in this way when they are of different sizes – but Penrose argues that size as a concept has no meaning in such physical environments.

In coherent cyclic cosmology, the direction of evolution of the universe is moving from old and cold to young and hot: the dense and hot state is in fact created by the empty and cold state, but the “why” of this is not so well known. It is not only size that prevents the two states from being related; in fact, time is equally important and valuable. The cold dense state and the hot dense state are on different time scales. The cold empty state continues forever in its own time geometry from the observer’s perspective, but the hot dense state creates its own time course.

The above definition can help to understand the hot dense state, which is created non-causally from the cold state. Perhaps it is better to say that the hot dense state arises from, or is established in, the cold, empty state. These are specific metaphysical ideas that have been extensively explored by philosophers of science in the context of quantum gravity. (In quantum gravity, cause-effect relationships break down.) Within our knowledge, it becomes difficult to separate physics and philosophy.

The empirical evidence

A coherent cyclic cosmology provides precise, if theoretical, answers to the question of where the Big Bang came from. But even if Roger Penrose's view and theory are confirmed by future developments in cosmology, it is still possible that a deeper philosophical question may arise that we are unable to answer: Where did physical reality itself come from? Where did the entire system of cycles emerge from? Ultimately, we come to one of the greatest and purest questions in metaphysics: Why is there something instead of nothing?

But our focus here is on explanations that lie within the realm of physics, not metaphysics! There are three comprehensive options for the profound question of how the cycles began. On the other hand, there may be no physical explanation for the question. These cycles may either repeat endlessly, in which case each one is a new universe in itself, or there may be a single, single cycle that repeats itself over and over, in which case the beginning of each cycle can be described by its end. Both of these approaches avoid the need for any uncaused events, because in physics nothing is uncaused.

Penrose also imagines an infinite sequence of new cycles, which is actually related to his interpretation of quantum theory. In quantum mechanics, a physical system is the result of a superposition of a large number of different states simultaneously, and when we measure it, we just pick one at random.

For Penrose, each cycle involves random quantum events that happen in a different way – meaning that each cycle is different from the cycles before and after it. This is actually good news for experimental physicists because it may allow them to glimpse the old universe, which they can observe through faint traces or anomalies of radiation left over from the Big Bang and seen by the Planck satellite.

The key point of Penrose’s view is that there are endless new cycles. But there is a natural solution to convert multi-cycle cosmology to a single cycle. In this case, physical reality consists of a single cycle around the Big Bang to an infinitely empty state in the distant future, and then re-forming around the Big Bang, repeating the same universe over and over again.

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