What Happened Before the Big Bang? Understanding the Origins of the Universe

KOMPAS.com – The Big Bang is generally considered to be the beginning of everything; About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was observed to experience a Big Bang explosion and continue to expand.

However, what were things like before the Big Bang? What happened before the big bang that formed the universe?

Understanding the Big Bang

Before answering this question, the first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually is.

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, says the Big Bang was a moment in time, not a point in space.

So, at the time of the Big Bang, it is possible that the universe was very small or very large because there was no way to look into the past. However, all scientists know is that the universe is very dense and is rapidly becoming less dense.

Also read: Interesting Facts about the Big Bang Theory

As a consequence, there is actually nothing outside the universe because the universe, by definition, is everything.

So, at the time of the Big Bang, everything was denser and hotter than it is today, but there was no more “outside” the universe than there is now.

According to Carroll, wherever we are in the universe, if we trace back 14 billion years, we will come to a point where the universe was very hot, dense, and expanding rapidly.

No one knows for sure what happened in the universe until 1 second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled enough for protons and neutrons to collide and stick together.

Many scientists believe that the universe experienced an exponential expansion process, called inflation, in its first seconds. This would refine the structure of space-time and could explain why matter is distributed so evenly in the universe today.

Also read: Mystery of Rare Gas Leaking from the Earth’s Core, Study Reveals It Was Formed After the Big Bang

Before the explosion

It is possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite expanse of dense, extremely hot material, which remained in a stable state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occurred.

This extra dense universe may be governed by quantum mechanics, which is physics on a very small scale.

Thus, the Big Bang represents the moment when classical physics took over primary control of the evolution of the universe.

For Stephen Hawking, this moment is the most important: He said, before the Big Bang, events could not be measured, and therefore could not be determined.

Hawking calls this theory a limitless proposal: Time and space, are finite, but have no boundaries or starting or ending points, just as the planet Earth is finite but has no edges.

Also read: NASA Builds Super Expensive Telescope to Investigate the Mystery of the Big Bang

So, Hawking points out, since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, we should throw them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang.

Or perhaps there was something else before the Big Bang that is worth pondering. One idea is that the Big Bang was not the beginning of time, but rather a moment of symmetry.

In this idea, before the Big Bang, there was another universe, identical to this universe, but its entropy increased into the past, not into the future.

Increasing entropy or increasing disorder in a system, is essentially the arrow of time. So, in this mirror universe, time would run counter to time in the modern universe and our universe would be in the past.

Proponents of this theory also argue that other properties of the universe would be reversed in this mirror universe.

Also read: Lapan: Ants on TV and Radio Crackles, Evidence of the Existence of the Big Bang

For example, physicist David Sloan argues that asymmetries in molecules and ions (called chirality) would have the opposite orientation as they exist in the universe.

A related theory holds that the Big Bang was not the beginning of everything, but rather a moment when the universe transitioned from a period of contraction to a period of expansion.

This “Big Bang” idea suggests that there may be an infinite number of Big Bangs as the universe expands, contracts, and expands again.

The problem with this idea, Carroll said, is that there is no explanation for why or how an expanding universe would contract and return to a low-entropy state.

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2023-10-01 02:30:00
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