One of the fundamental questions that philosophers and the greatest minds have
sought to answer is that of origin. How was man put on earth? Who or what created him?
These questions have remained at the core of humankind’s conscious since our conception.
In that search for the truth, science and technology have filled in many blanks.
We no longer think the world is flat, and we now know that our earth and even our solar system
and galaxy are not the center of the universe. As new tech like the James Webb Space Telescope
provides data by detecting the earliest elements of our universe, and the best minds on Earth
create mathematical models and theories based on the observable universe, mankind grows closer to
understanding what really happened before the Big Bang to get a better understanding. These
studies could unlock the age-old questions of how did we get here, and who or what created us.
The theories might seem boundless. But space is not; because telescopes act as time machines.
Looking out in space is like looking back in time. It sounds science fictional, but it’s actually
very simple: Light needs time to travel across the vast distances of space to reach our planet.
Of course light waves move extremely fast. So fast, it sets the fastest standard of speed in
our universe at about 186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second, every second. Light moves so fast
that as we go about our daily lives, it appears to travel instantaneously from one place to another.
When you think about it, you’ve already fathomed how it takes only a few billionths
of a second for light to travel across your living room once a lamp is switched on.
In space, however, the distances are so immense that the time light takes to travel is visible.
With light coming from Neptune taking 4 hours to reach Earth, we know that Neptune is 4 light hours
away. Similarly, the Moon, at about 239,000 miles or 390,000 km away, Light takes about
1.3 seconds to travel to Earth. So keep in mind, when you look up at the sky and gaze at the moon,
you’re actually seeing it as it was 1.3 seconds earlier. Are you not seeing into the past?
So when you look at the very first light, you’ll engage on a journey dating 13.8 billion years ago.
Back to the Big Bang, which is commonly thought of as the start of it all. The beginning of gravity,
the beginning of star dust, the beginning of our universe, the beginning of time,
and thus, the beginning of us. Research Professor of Physics at Caltech
and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, Sean Carroll is a master of theoretical physics,
quantum mechanics, spacetime, statistical mechanics, complexity,
and cosmology. As a master of fractals, he studies infinitely complex patterns that are
self-similar across different scales. In this case, the paramount scale of space itself.
According to Carroll’s analysis, it's possible that the universe at the Big
Bang was either teeny-tiny and itty-bitty or infinitely large. But there’s no way to look
back in time if there’s no light to look back upon. All we really know is that it was very,
very dense and that it very quickly got less dense. Remember that time and space is relative?
Well, Sean Carroll’s theories can fill in the gaps. He believes, "The Big Bang
is a moment in time, not a point in space." He explains this theory in more detail in
his book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself.”
The Conundrum of Time As a corollary, or a sort of logically scientific
default, there really isn't anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition,
everything. That means that at the Big Bang, everything was denser and hotter than it is now,
but there was nothing outside of that point than there is today.
To make it simple, the universe didn't expand into space; space itself expanded the universe.
Professor Sean Carroll also explained that "No matter where you are in the universe,
if you trace yourself back 14 billion years, you come to this point where it
was extremely hot, dense and rapidly expanding." Data shows that one second after the Big Bang,
the universe cooled off enough for protons and neutrons to collide and merge. Scientists have
dubbed this moment of exponential expansion as inflation. It smoothed the universe over like
a canvas for a Picasso. Pun-intended, it is the fabric of space and time.
And this theory could explain why matter is so evenly distributed in the universe today.
The Beginning of Classical Physics According to experts like Sean Carroll,
it possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultra-hot,
dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some purpose, the Big Bang ensued.
This extra-dense universe may have been governed by quantum mechanics,
the physics of the extremely small scale. The Big Bang, then, would have represented
the moment that classical physics took over as the major driver of the universe's evolution.
Stephen Hawking, one the greatest minds of our current era believed that before the Big Bang,
events were unmeasurable, and thus undefined. Hawking called this the No-boundary Proposal.
Hawking said, time and space are finite, but they don’t have any boundaries or starting or
ending points, the same way that the planet Earth is finite but has no edge.
In an interview on the National Geographic show “Star Talk” in 2018,
Hawking was quoted saying, "Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences,
one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang."
Here’s another thought. If we’d see far beyond the Big Bang, we’d end up gazing upon a Mirror
Universe. One idea is that the Big Bang isn't the beginning of time, but rather that it was
a moment of symmetry. In this idea, prior to the Big Bang, there was another universe,
identical to this one but with entropy increasing toward the past instead of toward the future.
It’s essentially the arrow of time where entropy - a thermodynamic quantity interpreted as the
degree of disorder or randomness in the system - increases disorder in a system. Professor
Carroll believes that it is pretty much a mirror universe where time would run opposite to time in
the modern universe and our universe would be in the past. Champions of this theory suggest
that other properties of the universe would be flip-flopped in this mirror universe. One of
those main advocates for the Mirror Universe is physicist David Sloan. He wrote in the University
of Oxford Science Blog, asymmetries in molecules and ions (called chiralities) would be in opposite
orientations to what they are in our universe. The Big Bounce
Rememeber that Carroll figures that the Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space. Well,
a related theory holds that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of everything, but rather a
moment in time when the universe switched from a period of contraction to a period of expansion.
It’s called the "Big Bounce" notion, and it suggests that there could be infinite Big
Bangs as the universe expands, contracts and expands again. According to Carroll,
the problem with these ideas is that there's no explanation for why or how an expanding universe
would contract and return to a low-entropy state. The Offspring Parent Universe Theory
Carroll along with his colleague Jennifer Chen have construed their own pre-Big Bang
vision. In 2004, the physicists suggested that perhaps the universe as we know it
is the offspring of a parent universe from which a bit of space-time has ripped off.
According to Carroll, It's like a radioactive nucleus decaying. When a nucleus decays,
it spits out an alpha or beta particle. The parent universe could do the same thing,
except instead of particles, it spits out infant-like universes. And the discharge could
actually be infinite. Carroll commented, "It's just a quantum fluctuation that lets it happen."
From that point, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to identify the theory. It’s pretty
much the definition of parallel universes that don't interact with or influence one another.
Does that all sound rather psychedelic? Well, it is because scientists don't yet have a way
to look back to the instant of the Big Bang. Trying to peer into the unknown isn’t possible
when the unknown can’t be seen. Yet, there's room to explore, it’s called our universe.
According to Carroll, the detection of gravitational waves from powerful galactic
collisions in 2015 opened up the leeway that these waves could be used to solve fundamental
mysteries about the universes’ expansion. Carroll exclaimed: Theoretical physicists
also have work to do. Making more-precise predictions about how quantum forces like
quantum gravity might work is forefront. According to Carroll, "We don't even know
what we're looking for until we have a theory." What’s your theory? Thoughts down below. For more
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