What came before The Big Bang?
The Big Bang Theory is the origin story of our universe.
Of us.
Before that, there was nothing.
Right?
But now some of the finest scientific minds are reimagining science's story of creation.
The universe is born inside of a black hole.
All of space that we live in is part of this brane.
B-R-A-N-E.
And rest assured, all of it involves some very weird science.
Weird Science
What came before The Big Bang?
This is ultimately a story as much about what we don't know as what we do,
but it's worth taking a second to appreciate how much we do know
about the earliest origins of the universe.
So, what is The Big Bang?
You've probably got a sense of the main idea of the Big Bang.
I mean, the name isn't that subtle.
But in short, it's the idea that everything in the universe all came out
of an incredibly small, incredibly dense, and incredibly hot, starting point.
We know this because the universe is still expanding
and we can measure this expansion
and reverse the tape, and tell with remarkable accuracy,
that our universe is close to 13.8 billion years old.
That's when time, as we know it, began.
Before that there was…
nothing.
right?
You know, the idea sounds impossible, preposterous.
But, you know, if you think about it a while, you begin to realise
it all depends on how you define ‘nothing’.
So…
What is nothing?
This is nothing.
The biggest pile of nothing on Earth, in fact.
It’s a vacuum chamber made by NASA
to try and recreate the state of total nothingness
by pumping out the air and freezing every remaining molecule
to make a near perfect vacuum.
When they switch this place on, this is as close as we can get
to a state of nothingness.
Everywhere we look, we see something.
We see atoms, we see trees, we see forests, we see water.
But hey, right here, we can pump all the atoms out.
And this is probably the arena out of which Genesis took place.
So for me, the universe did not come from absolute nothing.
That is a state of no equations, no space, no time.
It came from a pre-existing state.
The vacuum, which is nothing but the absence of matter.
In this version of nothing, energy can spontaneously transform itself into matter.
And therefore possibly one of these tiny explosions might have kept going
and ended up in the Big Bang.
It's now firmly within mainstream thinking that the Big Bang
was not the beginning of everything.
Ok, so buckle up. Here are three mind-bending theories
about what happened before the Big Bang
starting with
One of the reasons our maths and physics breaks down at the start of the Big Bang
is because as we approach this infinitely small, incredibly dense point,
we reach just that: infinity.
And in maths, when you get to infinity, that's kind of the same as cheating.
Whenever we encounter infinity in mathematics
something has gone terribly wrong.
So the Big Bounce Theory avoids this altogether.
In fact, it actually does away with the Big Bang.
It was certainly not Big Bang.
That is impossible. I don't believe in that at all.
Well, sort of.
The Big Bounce Theory proposes a cyclical loop
where the universe goes through a period of expansion and then collapsing
and then expanding again,
but crucially avoiding infinity by never fully collapsing to a single point.
It's a surprising thing a bouncing universe, but if you look around,
there’s a lot of cycles always happening,
we have seasons, we have even the motion of planets around the Sun.
In fact, nature tries to prefer things which are cyclic, in a way.
The core idea behind this theory is that under extreme density,
like the conditions of the early universe,
gravity stops being a force that pulls and starts to repel instead.
What we find is that gravitational force, which is attractive,
becomes repulsive when the universe is very small
and that is predicted by the mathematics, the new mathematics
which we obtain by the marriage of quantum mechanics and Einstein's gravity.
Problem solved.
I mean, yeah, not ‘solved’ as in ‘actually, definitely, solved’.
It's not quite that simple.
Others have a different take entirely.
We live on an extended object called a brane.
Professor Neil Turok.
And a brane - that’s B-R-A-N-E - short for membrane.
The central part of his theory is that the Big Bang was caused
by a violent event in a pre-existing larger universe, in a higher dimension.
Sometimes referred to as The Big Bulk.
It's a membrane which is three-dimensional.
All of space that we live in is part of this brane.
And within these models, you have to have at least two of these branes,
you can't have only one,
there has to be at least two, and they are separated by a little gap
along a fourth dimension of space.
It's not one of our existing dimensions.
And basically within these models, these two branes can collide.
When they collide, they fill with a density of plasma and matter,
and so that's the essential picture of the Big Bang in our model.
Ok, got all that?
The cheat sheet goes something like this.
Multiple dimensions.
Universe exists on a membrane, which is one of many in a higher dimension.
Three, the Big Bang was started
because one of these membranes collided with another one.
But this last theory relies on much more familiar ideas.
It owes a lot of its inspiration to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.
The main idea is that for the universe to prosper, it has to reproduce
and produce offspring universes…
Which for now I’m just going to cal the “Big Black Hole Bang Theory”
The idea works by analogy to how biology works.
It says that the universe has an ancestor, which is another universe.
How is the universe born from the ancestor?
According to this hypothesis, the universe is born inside of a black hole.
A black hole is a star which collapses
and where everything becomes infinite and time stops.
There is a bounce inside of every black hole.
The material contracts and contracts and contracts again
and then begins to expand again.
And that is the Big Bang, which initiates a new region of the universe,
So it relies on the idea that under incredible density,
like that found at the centre of a black hole, an expansion is triggered.
Before the Big Bang was another universe much like her own.
In that universe, there was a big cloud of gas and dust.
It collapsed to form a big, massive star.
That star exploded.
It left behind a black hole.
And in that black hole there was a region,
if you were misfortunate enough to fall in,
you would find it becoming denser and denser and denser,
you wouldn't survive this, but let's imagine you did,
and all of a sudden it would explode again, and that would be our Big Bang.
The truth is, is that we may never know the answer
about what happened before the Big Bang.
These theories are not the kind of theories that are easy to test,
and it may well be that they're actually impossible
for our brains or technology to ever understand.
But while this is weird science, it is serious science.
These scientists are one of many who are asking a fundamental question:
Where do we come from?
And in case that's a bit intense for you…
Is there an ultimate answer?
I don't know. I don't even know if the question makes sense.