What Existed Before The Big Bang?
In 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, mathematician, astronomer and professor of theoretical physics published a report in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles (Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels) under the title “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques” (“A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae”), a paper that was going to make him internationally recognized in the scientific as well as the religious community.
The paper provided significant insights into the ‘expansion of the universe’ which Lemaitre derived from the solutions of Einstein’s general relativity. The publication in which the report was published wasn’t much recognizable at the time. However, in 1931, physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington translated Lemaitre’s paper in English. He did not include Lemaitre’s estimation of the ‘Hubble’s constant’ though for reasons that were unknown for quite a long time. Lemaitre observationally estimated the value of the Hubble’s constant at the time but for some reason it was not published in the translation. Edwin Hubble provided the accurate constant value two years later after Lemaitre’s publication.
Physicist and popular science author Mario Livio reported in the year 2011:
Lemaître omitted those paragraphs himself when translating the paper for the Royal Astronomical Society, in favour of reports of newer work on the subject, since by that time Hubble’s calculations had already improved on Lemaître’s earlier ones.
When Lemaitre presented his ideas to Einstein, he did not quite accept it and said “Vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable” meaning:
Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious
Lemaître was then invited to London to participate in a meeting of the British Association on the relation between the physical universe and spirituality where he proposed that the universe expanded from an initial point, which he called the “Primeval Atom”. He developed this idea in a report published in Nature. Lemaître’s theory appeared for the first time in an article for the general reader on science and technology subjects in the December 1932 issue of Popular Science. Lemaître’s theory became better known as the “Big Bang theory,” a picturesque term playfully coined during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast by the astronomer Fred Hoyle.
What is the Big Bang Theory?
The Big Bang hypothesis states that all of the current and past matter in the Universe came into existence at the same time, roughly 13.8 billion years ago. At this time, all matter was compacted into a very small ball with infinite density and intense heat called a Singularity. Suddenly, the Singularity began expanding, and the universe as we know it began. The first atoms are thought to have formed when the universe was around 400,000 years old. Before that, the universe was simply too hot and too energetic to let atomic nuclei capture electrons. The first stars sparkled into life, cosmologists believe, about 250 million years after the Big Bang, and the first galaxies shortly after that.
Crucially, the theory is compatible with Hubble–Lemaître law — the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from Earth. Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backwards in time using the known laws of physics, the theory describes an increasingly concentrated cosmos preceded by a singularity in which space and time lose meaning.
The religious/mythological view
According to Boshongo people of central Africa, in the beginning there was only darkness and water. Along with those two elements existed a god named Bumba. Bumba, one day, vomited out of stomachache and spitted the sun. The sun dried up some water leaving land. He vomited some more spitting moon, stars and so on. According to the old testament, god created Adam and Eve only six days into creation. The Qur’an says that “the heavens and the earth were joined together as one unit, before We clove them asunder” . Following this big explosion, Allah “turned to the sky, and it had been (as) smoke. He said to it and to the earth: ‘Come together, willingly or unwillingly.’ They said: ‘We come (together) in willing obedience’. Thus the elements and what was to become the planets and stars began to cool, come together, and form into shape, following the natural laws that Allah established in the universe. The Qur’an further states that Allah created the sun, the moon, and the planets, each with their own individual courses or orbits. “It is He Who created the night and the day, and the sun and the moon; all (the celestial bodies) swim along, each in its rounded course” For Hindus the universe was created by Brahma, the creator who made the universe out of himself. After Brahma created the world, it is the power of Vishnu which preserves the world and human beings.
What existed before the big bang?
Before we proceed to answer this question, it’s important to understand the fact that big bang theory is, so far, the most widely accepted theory of beginning which is consistent with the working mathematics. Big bang ‘explosion’ is considered to be the beginning of space and time itself. Thus, there is nothing before the initial moment of the universe’s rapid expansion. Theoretically speaking, the Big Bang took place at no place and at no time. Thus, there is nothing before the initial moment of the universe’s rapid expansion. The question is similar to the question of “What happens if you move two objects closer together than zero distance.”
There’s a very interesting analogy that might help us understand the ‘prior-to-big-bang’ universe. Pick the smallest real number that is bigger than 0. Somehow one can always pick one that is smaller than yours. If you pick 0.0001, one can pick 0.00005. In fact, one can always just take the half of your number, and that will be a smaller one. Hence asking what is the smallest number greater than zero does not make any sense. There is no smallest number that is bigger than 0. Big Bang is something similar. There was no first moment. Time itself came to existence with it, and we cannot point to the earliest moment. As in the example above — we can always have a moment earlier than a particular other. We call that first missing moment a singularity.
Here’s a thought: What if our universe is but the offspring of another, older universe? Some astrophysicists speculate that this story is written in the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang: the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
The Conformal Concyclic Cosmology Hypothesis
Unexpected hot spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) could have been produced by black holes evaporating before the Big Bang. So says a trio of scientists led by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in a paper presenting new evidence that our universe is just one stage in a potentially infinite cycle of cosmic extinction and rebirth.
Penrose, based at the University of Oxford , has developed a rival theory known as “conformal concyclic cosmology“ (CCC) which posits that the universe became uniform before, rather than after, the Big Bang. The idea is that the universe cycles from one aeon to the next, each time starting out infinitely small and ultra-smooth before expanding and generating clumps of matter. That matter eventually gets sucked up by supermassive black holes, which over the very long term disappear by continuously emitting Hawking radiation. This process restores uniformity and sets the stage for the next Big Bang.
The theory is a fascinating and imaginative alternative to inflation, but the data doesn’t support it. If Penrose’s CCC hypothesis is correct, we should also be able to see some left-over information from the previous aeon in the cosmic microwave background around us. The data, however, speaks a different story. Let’s leave this topic for the upcoming article.
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