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Big Bang Didn’t Mark the Beginning of the Universe?

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A new theory says that the Big Bang may have been merely a moment in the history of a Universe that has always existed.

What if the Universe existed from the beginning? That is, what if it didn’t have a beginning and existed forever and ever, for all eternity? Of fact, this theory has little to do with the more widely held belief that everything began as a point of infinite density, or a singularity, that rapidly expanded 13.7 billion years ago in an event known as the Big Bang.

However, physicists Bruno Bento of the University of Liverpool and Stav Zalel of Imperial College London argue that the Big Bang did not indicate the beginning of the Universe, but rather that it was already present when the Big Bang occurred.

To do so, a novel theory of gravity is used, as stated in a paper just published on the arXiv server. “Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy,” adds Bento, who has spent years studying the nature of time.

In their work, the researchers used a new theory of quantum gravity, called ‘causal set theory’, in which both space and time are divided into discrete fragments of spacetime. That is, somewhere there must exist a fundamental unit or ‘atom’ of space-time. By applying this idea to the beginning of the Universe, Bento and his colleagues discovered that the Universe may not have had a beginning, but has existed from an infinite past and that only in ‘recent’ times did it evolve into what we know as the Big Bang.

In their new work, the physicists used a new quantum gravity theory known as ‘causal set theory,’ in which both space and time are separated into discrete spacetime fragments. That is, a fundamental unit or ‘atom’ of space-time must exist someplace. By applying this concept to the origins of the Universe, Bento and his colleagues determined that the Universe did not have a beginning, but has existed indefinitely and only recently evolved into what we currently call the Big Bang.

Gravity’s insoluble conundrum

Gravity may be the most difficult and annoying topic that physics faces today. In truth, we have two different Universe theories, both of which are extremely effective: Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. The problem is that both ideas are incompatible with one another.

On the one hand, Quantum Mechanics effectively describes three of nature’s four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force). And it does it down to tiny sizes, anticipating and later locating all of the particles that make up matter. In turn, General Relativity is the most complete and powerful account of gravity that we have. Despite its many advantages, General Relativity is still a work in progress. In fact, these predictions are shattered in at least two places in the Universe: the cores of black holes and the Big Bang.

In both circumstances, those regions are referred to as ‘singularities,’ or locations in space-time where the present laws of physics break down. Gravity becomes extraordinarily strong in them on a less than minute scale of length. As a result, in order to solve the problem of singularities, physicists want a description that can contain tremendous gravity at singularities. Many have attempted, and several ideas have been formed, but none have been able to answer the puzzle, which is precisely where Bento and Zalel’s novel approach to space and time comes in.

Space and time are regarded continuous in all physics theories. In other words, they constitute a kind of soft ‘bottom’ behind which all reality resides. Two points in that continuous space-time can be as close to each other as feasible, just as two events can occur at times as close to each other as possible.

But in causal set theory, space-time is not continuous, but is divided into discrete fragments, something that we could think of as ‘atoms’ of space-time. The theory, then, imposes strict limits on how close two points in space or two events can be in time, since they could not be closer to each other than the size of the ‘atom’ itself.

It would be equivalent to staring at a television screen. From a distance, it appears to be a continuous flow of images. However, as we get closer to differentiating the pixels, we will notice that their size defines the limit to which two images can become closer. Obviously, the idea has far-reaching consequences for the very essence of time.

In Bento’s words, “A huge part of the causal set philosophy is that the passage of time is something physical, that it should not be attributed to some emergent sort of illusion or to something that happens inside our brains that makes us think time passes; this passing is, in itself, a manifestation of the physical theory.”

“So, in causal set theory, a causal set will grow one ‘atom’ at a time and get bigger and bigger.”

Because singularities cannot exist in the new theory, this method of looking at time eliminates the Big Bang singularity problem at once. In other words, matter cannot be compressed into infinitely small points because they cannot be smaller than an atom of space-time.

So, once the singularity of the Big Bang is removed, what would the beginning of the Universe look like?

“In our work,” says Bento, “there would be no Big Bang as a beginning, as the causal set would be infinite to the past, and so there’s always something before.”

In other words, the Universe may not have had a beginning but has just remained indefinitely. And what we see as the Big Bang could simply be a particular point in the evolution of an ever-existing causal collection, rather than a true beginning.

Of course, much more work remains to be done before the hypothesis is accepted. A work that describes the intricate evolution of the Universe during and after the Big Bang from this unique perspective.

The discovery, according to Bento, does not demonstrate how the new theory can be physically translated into the Universe we see around us, but it does demonstrate that “at least mathematically, this can be done.”

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