What if the Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning?
Few things are as mysterious as where and how we came to be.
It’s a question that has fascinated humanity for thousands of years, with different theories
often changing our very understanding of our own existence.
But maybe what we commonly hold to be true isn’t actually true at all.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if the big
bang wasn’t the beginning?
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The big bang is currently held as one of our best and most popular explanations for the
origins of the universe.
It’s been around for almost a century, proposing that 13.8 billion years ago everything sprang
into existence in a trillionth of a second from one infinitely dense point, and that
in this trillionth of a second the universe grew from a singularity to be much, much larger.
While the big bang is still just a theory, there’s plenty of scientific evidence that
may support its existence, like universal expansion and the detection of cosmic microwave
background radiation.
Universal expansion was first observed in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble, as he was studying
redshift.
Because space is so unimaginably large and light takes such a long time to reach anywhere,
the further away an object is the longer the wavelengths of light allowing us to see that
object are.
This means that far away objects lean more towards the “red end” of the electromagnetic
spectrum.
Hubble realised, though, that those far away objects were in fact getting redder, meaning
that they weren’t just distant but were also moving further and further away.
This proved that expansion is definitely happening, and so could feasibly be traced back to one
origin point.
Cosmic microwave background radiation, on the other hand, was discovered much later,
in the 1960s.
It can be detected uniformly in every direction from as far back as 13.8 billion years, and
is thought to be residual radiation left over from the initial “origin of the universe”
event.
So, what we do know is that expansion is still happening, and that the CMB can be traced
back to almost the start of everything.
But the big bang is still only one explanation that caters for both of these phenomenons.
Bouncing cosmology is an alternative fringe theory which seemingly solves some of the
big bang’s discrepancies.
It argues in favour of something that Einstein suggested, that we live in a “cyclic universe”…
That, yes, there was a monumental event 14 billion years ago, but it was more of a bounce
than a bang.
Reconciling the arguably hard-to-swallow idea that before the big bang happened absolutely
nothing existed, the big bounce suggests that there was another universe out there before
ours, and the “event” that created our existence simultaneously ended, or at least
drastically rearranged, another.
The theory also to some degree allows for the cosmological constant - another Einstein
prediction - which doesn’t otherwise fit with the big bang; if expansion comes and
goes and isn’t a permanent state, then the cosmological constant could exist.
Finally, if bouncing cosmology were true, it’d also grant us an answer to how the
universe will end; we’d simply see another big bounce and another universe will begin
again in its place.
While the big bounce doesn’t have nearly as much credibility as the big bang, many
proponents of it say that we have about as much evidence for bouncing cosmology as we
have for the singularity – that is, very little.
The wider issue is that big-bang-style singularities themselves (as we understand them) do end
up breaking the laws of physics, and we still can’t prove what these points of infinite
density are really like or what ultimately happens inside them.
For big bounce supporters, this could suggest that things did exist before inflation.
So, the event known as the big bang isn’t the beginning, but rather the end of something
else.
But, there’s still no way of knowing what might have come before.
We might think our own universe is pretty great, that there are a lot of interesting
things to study here, but who’s to say that the one that theoretically stood before wasn’t
much more exciting?
It might’ve been bristling with populated, alien worlds in every single star system;
it could have been much larger and stocked with rare resources; or it could’ve housed
celestial bodies that we can’t even begin to understand or imagine.
The other big, scientific theory about the dawn of the universe is eternal inflation.
This relies on there being an inflationary vacuum, which is a hypothetical vacuum our
entire universe sits inside like a bubble.
As such, eternal inflation also allows for the existence of a multiverse - where multiple
universes reside in multiple bubbles.
As per this theory, while the big bang may well have been the beginning of this universe,
it wouldn’t have been the beginning of anything on a larger scale.
Instead, it’d be just one of potentially infinite big bangs happening everywhere at
once all across the vacuum.
Were eternal inflation to be proven, and if we could find a way to traverse the vacuum,
then we could wind up visiting these other universes to see for ourselves what they’re
like.
We might even be able to witness another big bang actually taking place, which would show
us an alternative version of our own origin story and go a long way to answering the age-old
question of where we came from.
There are some even zanier, though less-scientific theories too.
The steady state theory argues that expansion is real but has been happening infinitely
for all of time, thereby creating a universe where there is no beginning and no end.
Although, what little evidence we do have for the big bang disproves this almost completely.
And of course, one other huge alternative to the big bang is creationism, which predates
the big bang theory by centuries.
Creationism, the idea that the universe was created as we know it by a divine entity,
exists in some form in most major religions, and people believe in it to different extents.
While some argue that the universe is only around 10,000 years old, others say that it
was God who actually caused the big bang, creating the laws of nature and physics and
to some degree reconciling faith with science.
If the creationists are correct, then scientific evidence for cosmology is perhaps little more
than a stringent test of faith - a test that those who do subscribe to the big bang theory
have supposedly failed.
Arguably, though, creationism isn’t even the most elaborate cosmological alternative.
The “digital simulation” theory has a growing number of believers, too.
And if the universe isn’t actually real because it’s a sim or another kind of digital
creation – like a hologram – it doesn’t even require a conclusive origin explanation
at all.
We, and everything we’ve ever known, were simply “switched on”.
By who is another question entirely!
The idea that “nothing is real” is perhaps also popular because it provides a great way
to explain away things that don’t make sense or don’t match up - because things don’t
need to match up.
Whoever designed the simulation may have just done a really bad job, accidentally leaving
all that CMB radiation for us to detect, and forgetting to make the speed of light fast
enough so that we can actually see and understand everything there is.
Expansion might also just be a weird glitch the simulation authors never managed to iron
out.
For any alternative origin theory, though, learning that the big bang either didn’t
happen or was something else entirely, and maybe not even that important, would categorically
change our understanding of science and existence.
But that’s what would happen if the big bang wasn’t the beginning.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
Let us know in the comments, check out these other clips from Unveiled, and make sure you
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