What existed before the big bang?

[time traveller d]

i all ways wonder this. what existed before the big bang?

 

[Quadruple Bypass]

i think this was supposed to go into the cosmology section.

 

[row]

what existed before the big bang?

hi i think i read somewhere that,it is assumed that time came into existence with big bang just as the other dimensions hence the concepts like 'before' ,'after' etc.are irrevelant with bigbang.

 

[J77]

From a non-cosmologists point of view...

I agree. I always thought that everything we know, ie. space an time, came from the singularity known as the big bang.

My question would be - in what did this singularity exist?

What caused the singularity?

If I'm in the place where the singularity exists, can I redo the entire universe again, both in space and time?

 

[EL]

Tracing our univserse backwards in time, General Relativity predicts it started from a singularity.
What must be kept in mind is though that GR is not compatible with quantum theory, which means that it's not meaningful to use GR to predict the earliest stages of the Big Bang. Hence wheter there was a singularity or not is an open question, and will remain so until we find a good theory of quantum gravity.

 

[daveb]

a small silence?

 

[time traveller d]

i just came up with a theory. another universe. maybe when a
universe ends it explodes in a big bang and creates another universe. what do you guys think?

 

[Garth]

Another universe - a great idea that is very popular in cosmological circles, but show me it.

Garth

 

[Pengwuino]

i just came up with a theory. another universe. maybe when a
universe ends it explodes in a big bang and creates another universe. what do you guys think?

The big bang wasn't an explosion

 

[Flatland]

the big bang was more like the creation of "reality"

 

[wolram]

The quantum gravity guys are your best bet for an ansewer, but even they do not know what topping to put on their crustless pizza.

 

[marcus]

a small silence?

this fits Renate Loll's picture
http://arxiv.org/find/grp_physics/1/au:+Loll/0/1/0/all/0/1

Reconstructing the Universe
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0505154

The Universe from Scratch
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0509010

Loll has a quantum model of spacetime down at the fundamental (planck-scale) level from which a familiar classical large-scale spacetime emerges
and she and her co-workers do computer model of this spacetime

you can say that it starts (by a quantum fluctuation according to her law) with a "small silence" and then grows

because of limitation of the computer used to model, it cannot grow indefinitely, eventually it starts to shrink and after a while *poof* disappears into a "small silence" again.

this is not necessarily right but at least it is a quantum model that sort of works and runs by its own rules and you can put in a computer.

Loll is at the same institute of theoretical physics as Gerard 't Hooft one of the few Nobel Laureates in theoretical physics who is still not an 'elder statesman' and 't Hooft himself is doing original work related to quantum gravity.

I think Loll's picture of the universe is worth taking seriously, even if it seems stretching it to have everything arise from an accidental quantum hiccup. Once they get a model going they can crawl around inside it (as a virtual reality inside the computer) and measure geometrical stuff and that is pretty interesting. so in a sense who cares where it came from as long as it is fun to explore.

 

[marcus]

i just came up with a theory. another universe. maybe when a
universe ends it explodes in a big bang and creates another universe. what do you guys think?

Something like what you say has become a widely studied possibility. A world-class scientist who directs research in this area is Abhay Ashtekar
He just spent the past academic term at 't Hooft's institute in Holland but now I think he may be back home at his own institute at Penn State.

The model Ashtekar works with has a gravitational collapse prior to the big bang. there is a deterministic evolution of the wavefunction through what used to be called the "singularity".

Strictly speaking singularities do not exist in nature so one has to find a model that will evolve through them and not get shook up by them. A lot of people are working on this.

here are some of Ashtekar's papers

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0605078
The Issue of the Beginning in Quantum Gravity

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0605011
Gravity, Geometry and the Quantum

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602086
Quantum Nature of the Big Bang

A lot of the writing in these papers is accessible to general audience---not too technical with only occasional patches of equations.

If anyone wants a more thorough treatment there is this 100-page treatise with computer animations and much technical detail, by Martin Bojowald
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601085
Loop Quantum Cosmology

 

[Chronos]

Still dodging the issue, in my mind. At some point [e.g., the 'original' big bang] we must confront a breakdown in causality. The cyclical universe model merely pushes responsibility for explaining the existence of our universe to an earlier 'cycle'. I fail to see how this is superior to arguments favoring a universe from nothing.

 

[EL]

Still dodging the issue, in my mind. At some point [e.g., the 'original' big bang] we must confront a breakdown in causality. The cyclical universe model merely pushes responsibility for explaining the existence of our universe to an earlier 'cycle'. I fail to see how this is superior to arguments favoring a universe from nothing.

If the Universe is "cyclic", why do we need a moment of creation (i.e. an "original" big bang)?
However, I agree in that I do not find an eternal (cyclic) universe more satisfactory than a "universe from nothing".

 

[marcus]

If the Universe is "cyclic", why do we need a moment of creation (i.e. an "original" big bang)?
However, I agree in that I do not find an eternal (cyclic) universe more satisfactory than a "universe from nothing".

Hi EL, you and Chronos are referring, I think, to some interesting questions like where does the overall cosmic process come from, however you picture it. I am not entirely sure how you would phrase it.

Chronos referred to the "original" big bang, which has something of that flavor.

I am not sure that a question like "how did existence come into existence?" is a scientific question. I am not sure that it can be be answered by science.

what I am concerned with is a rather different business. I am concerned with questions that one can clearly ask and attempt to answer in the context of science.

It is more like asking simply "what was the situation one hour or one year before what used to be called the singularity?"
What was there one hour or one year before the start of expansion? Or better let me say one second.
what immediately preceded the expansion stage that we see around us?

Asking this conforms to the traditional way that scientists work back in time. You construct a model that fits observations made in the present and that you can run backwards in time. If it breaks down somewhere along the line, you fix it and check to see that it still fits observations. And as with any model, you try to devise more tests, new observations that will provide more stringent tests that the model will or will not be able to pass. One can never fully believe. One always continues to test. (well, within reason)

All (scientific) inferences about the past are based on some model and their relative credibility depends on how well the model has been tested.

At this point in scientific history we are just beginning to develop and test models that inch back a little bit before the start of expansion, through a brief period called a "bounce"

If you have read the Ashtekar article "the issue of the beginning" you will realize he is not talking about a cyclic process and he does not consider the broad philosophical or metaphysical question (as per Chronos "original" big bang) of how the whole process whether cyclic or not might have come into existence.

the only "beginning" Ashtekar is talking about is the matter of fact beginning of expansion. According to his model it was preceded by a contraction. And he is very careful not to say what kind of contraction. It could be a black hole collapse, or it could be somebody else's big crunch. Ashtekar's model does not, at this point, say details like that. So he avoids putting a name on it. All the model says is that immediately before the start of expansion there was some kind of gravitational collapse, which could be of an entire spacetime or it could be of a small portion or region of a larger tract. he says it is a classical region---that is all. And that is all the model tells us, at least for now.

he also says that the wavefunction undergoes a deterministic evolution through the bounce. (at least in this particular quantumgravity model)
it is significant, I think, that he says deterministic.

that evolution through the bounce is what Ashtekar and the others have been following through repeatedly with their computer models---and what you see plotted out graphically in several of the more technical papers.

I think it is important to stress that nobody is ducking some important scientific question. The philo or meta question of how or why did existence come into existence is not being addressed because that is not what this model of the bounce, or ex-singularity, is about.
Asking the philosophical question makes as much sense, or as little sense, as it did 10 years ago or 20 years ago before this work was done.

Also it is important to stress that the new model has not been tested. some papers have been written about the phenomenology of LQC, with some ideas of tests being presented. but that is pretty rudimentary.
Some names in connection with this are Roy Maartens and Parampreet Singh---there may be others too.

So at present one has models where time stops at beginning of expansion and one also has at least one model where time does NOT stop there.
One cannot, at present, claim that time stops at beginning of expansion because this has not been proven.
Nor can one claim that time does NOT stop. Because the model that continues on back through the bounce has not been adequately tested.

Personally it does not bother me to be in a situation where this question has not been resolved----lack of resolution in science is a routine circumstance.

Also the grand question of cosmic existence has still the same status as before---this little extension back in time past where the 1915 General Relativity model broke down is just that: a little extension. It let's us peer back just a wee bit further, test a little bit more, extrapolate a little further etc.

 

[Silverbackman]

I think the cyclic model seems to make sense. And I don't want to limit it to the big bang-big crunch scenario. Our universe probably did exist forever and the current universe we live in is a phaze that happened 13.7 billion years ago (age of our current universe). Perhaps when our universe dies, whether it be the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, or Big Rip, the universe will just finish its current cycle and begin as a new universe. Each phaze of the universe maybe radically different than the next or previous universe. Perhaps our next universe will be nothing but energy with no matter. New laws of Nature will probably arise.

Now what I really would like to know is whether the laws of the universe were a result of randomness or an intelligent force beyond our reasoning. What do you think? I know this sort of leaves the realm of science, but this topic pretty much does that already.

 

[marcus]

I think the cyclic model seems to make sense...

I just want to make clear that we are talking at cross purposes. Not about the same thing.

I think the question "what existed before the big bang?" is a definite concrete physics question that one can hope will be answered near-to-mid-term.

One can hope to have a model that is roughly similar to the present one that cosmologists use, but quantized, and which is testable in various ways by observations of some sort.

But talking about "cyclic" universes strikes me as going off into the realm of speculation. At the moment I cannot very well see how one could verify such a notion---so it remains rather in fantasy land. Or myth. People can believe in cycles (or "branes" bumping again and again into each other) if their personality and tastes are such that they LIKE to believe in such things. And it does not harm that I can see.
Lots of scientists like to speculatate about such notions.

But I think there is a qualitative difference between that---fantasizing "cycles" of tens and hundred of billions of years, as if one could at present know----and simply asking about ONE SECOND BEFORE the start of expansion. (it is like asking about the derivative of a function, instead of wanting the whole plot)

there may be things we can extrapolate, using a quantum cosmo model that we can test. it is possible. there is a research program at Penn State currently pursuing that knowledge.

maybe you do not see a qualitative difference between one second and tens of billions of years, which is fine. they both are periods of time. I can't say one view is wrong and the other right. But just want to say that I do make a distinction.

 

[Enos]

I don't think there is evidence that creation exist. So why should one assume that it should and believe that there was nothing before the big bang and that our existence needed to be created. Creation to me is an old belief that stuck around from before science started explaining things like the process of life, the formation of planets and stars, our weather and many other things that would make one believe that creation exist.

 

[marcus]

I don't think there is evidence that creation exist. So why should one assume that it should and believe that there was nothing before the big bang and that our existence needed to be created. Creation to me is an old belief that stuck around from before science started explaining things like the process of life, the formation of planets and stars, our weather and many other things that would make one believe that creation exist.

I agree with you Enos. You might like to learn what Laplace said to Napoleon.

"Sir, that is an assumption which I don't need!"

Laplace was a mathematician who made a very good model of celestial motion (planets stars etc.). This model explained a lot of things. Napoleon had been a student in Laplace mathematics class in school and when he was a great man he received a visit from his old teacher. Laplace gave him a copy of his book of Celestial Mechanics. Napoleon said thankyou Laplace and what is the role of God in your model of the universe? Laplace replied that God was an extra assumption that he didn't need in the model.
Maybe the same could be said of the notion of creation. If you just focus on the model then you may not see any need to elaborate the story and put in that detail---it might simply be irrelevant.

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là

more authoritative version of story, in Wiki encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace

 

[Garth]

Laplace, of course, was a practicing Catholic who lived through the anti-cleric/aristocracy period of the French Revolution.

The stability of the solar system had been a problem for Newton who had been prepared for God to correct the orbits of the planets to keep the Earth on its 'proper' orbit, Laplace had shown that the system could have formed from a nebula, and was stable (over many thousands of orbits), without Divine intervention.

It is interesting that Newton's suggested means of God 'sticking his finger in' was to use the non-periodic comets, but Halley then showed how even this harbingers of doom themselves kept Newton's laws!

Garth

 

[Universe_Man]

We could never really know for certain, but I am sure however this whole thing happened, it is pretty damn amazing.

 

[marcus]

We could never really know for certain, but I am sure however this whole thing happened, it is pretty damn amazing.

It is pretty damn amazing. I feel we are lucky to be living at a time when people are finding out new stuff about it so fast.

One of the recent articles by Ashtekar, Pawlowski, and Singh just appeared in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, and an online wide audience physics review called PHYSORG.com picked up on it.

http://www.physorg.com/news66660003.html

sample quote:

" 'General relativity can be used to describe the universe back to a point at which matter becomes so dense that its equations don’t hold up,' says Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State. 'Beyond that point, we needed to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein.' By combining quantum physics with general relativity, Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, were able to develop a model that traces through the Big Bang to a shrinking universe that exhibits physics similar to ours.

In research reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters, the team shows that, prior to the Big Bang, there was a contracting universe with space-time geometry that otherwise is similar to that of our current expanding universe. As gravitational forces pulled this previous universe inward, it reached a point at which the quantum properties of space-time cause gravity to become repulsive, rather than attractive.

'Using quantum modifications of Einstein’s cosmological equations, we have shown that in place of a classical Big Bang there is in fact a quantum Bounce,' says Ashtekar. 'We were so surprised by the finding that there is another classical, pre-Big Bang universe that we repeated the simulations with different parameter values over several months, but we found that the Big Bounce scenario is robust.' "Conceivably there is some showmanship here, perhaps on the reporter's part. Another researcher got results indicating a bounce back in 2001, but I believe it was mostly done analytically (not checked by a lot of computer simulation) and under more restrictive simplifying assumptions. but I think that is OK. Ashtekar et al are doing new work by showing the bounce to be robust---it works under a broader more general assumptions. I won't quarrel with their right to be surprised and to be celebrating.

==============

Here is the article that they published in Physical Review Letters (I think what occasioned the physorg.com news item)

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602086
Quantum Nature of the Big Bang
Abhay Ashtekar, Tomasz Pawlowski, Parampreet Singh
4 Pages, 2 Figures. Minor changes to match the published version...
Phys.Rev.Lett. 96 (2006) 141301

"Some long standing issues concerning the quantum nature of the big bang are resolved in the context of homogeneous isotropic models with a scalar field. Specifically, the known results on the resolution of the big bang singularity in loop quantum cosmology are significantly extended as follows: i) the scalar field is shown to serve as an internal clock, thereby providing a detailed realization of the `emergent time' idea; ii) the physical Hilbert space, Dirac observables and semi-classical states are constructed rigorously; iii) the Hamiltonian constraint is solved numerically to show that the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. Thanks to the non-perturbative, background independent methods, unlike in other approaches the quantum evolution is deterministic across the deep Planck regime."

 

[wolram]

A simple view (some thing) must have been in existence for eternity for us to
be here at the present, so (whatever) model you posit, it comes down to the
eternal (thing) :yuck:

 

[marcus]

A simple view (some thing) must have been in existence for eternity for us to
be here at the present, so (whatever) model you posit, it comes down to the
eternal (thing) :yuck:

I understand everything except the *yuck* :yuck:

Except for the yuck, that seems like a fine way to put it!

and scientists and philosophers shall, in their various ways,
attempt to understand whatever is understandable about this eternal,
this "physis.

Fizzis was the Greek word for NATURE.

I guess I will change my sig now.

If I was putting smilies I would say "it comes down to the eternal thing "

with signs of approval, confusion and big grin.

 

[SpaceTiger]

I've split off much of the discussion into another thread, since it was going pretty far off-topic.

 

[marcus]

Glad you did it.
I noticed that it had gotten away from bang and was about observable.

the new thread title is excellently descriptive

Evolution of the Observable Universe
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=121090

 

[Enos]

I submitted a paper to perhaps explain what existed before the big bang but is currently going through editorial reviews right now. Whether or not it gets accepted I'll share it to see if you guys can poke at it if it's wrong and get some opinions.

 

[masudr]

what existed before the big bang?

From which reference frame?

 

[CosmologyHobbyist]

Hi everyone! I have 3 questions :

If the big bang was a quantum event (as suggested by some entries in this thread) - doesn't that require quantum field to exist before the big bang? Wouldn't this make it likely that quantum field exists "outside" the big bang universe? My question 1 : Does anybody have more information on the topic of quantum field before and outside of big bang universe?

The only other big bang origin I have heard of is from singularity - Question 2 : Is there a mainstream big bang theory that creates the quantum field out of the big bang?

Question 3 : Are there other mainstream theories on relationship of big bang and quantum field?

Thanks for putting up with my ignorance! :)

 

[marcus]

Hi everyone! I have 3 questions :

If the big bang was a quantum event (as suggested by some entries in this thread) - doesn't that require quantum field to exist before the big bang? Wouldn't this make it likely that quantum field exists "outside" the big bang universe? My question 1 : Does anybody have more information on the topic of quantum field before and outside of big bang universe?

The only other big bang origin I have heard of is from singularity - Question 2 : Is there a mainstream big bang theory that creates the quantum field out of the big bang?

Question 3 : Are there other mainstream theories on relationship of big bang and quantum field?

Thanks for putting up with my ignorance! :)

the mainstream about the quantum beginnings of expansion is MANY STREAMS. it is too early to try to sum up and say that there is a consensus. I suggest you SAMPLE one of the quantum bang theories.

Don't for god sake rely on secondhand popular science journalism, if you read that you should ALSO go directly to primary sources and GET WHAT YOU CAN. skip the technicalities and read the summaries and conclusions.

Here is a sample:


http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602086
Quantum Nature of the Big Bang
Abhay Ashtekar, Tomasz Pawlowski, Parampreet Singh
4 Pages, 2 Figures. Minor changes to match the published version...
Phys.Rev.Lett. 96 (2006) 141301

"Some long standing issues concerning the quantum nature of the big bang are resolved in the context of homogeneous isotropic models with a scalar field. Specifically, the known results on the resolution of the big bang singularity in loop quantum cosmology are significantly extended as follows: i) the scalar field is shown to serve as an internal clock, thereby providing a detailed realization of the `emergent time' idea; ii) the physical Hilbert space, Dirac observables and semi-classical states are constructed rigorously; iii) the Hamiltonian constraint is solved numerically to show that the big bang is replaced by a big bounce. Thanks to the non-perturbative, background independent methods, unlike in other approaches the quantum evolution is deterministic across the deep Planck regime."

This was published in Physical Review Letters which is a legitimate science journal, not pop sci. If you can understand one paragraph in ten, or one paragraph in twenty, you are getting something worthwhile already. If more, then so much the better. There will usually be some conclusions at the end of a scientific article that are expressed in general language (but may be heavily qualified and intentionally vague so as not to go out on a limb)

when they say "solved numerically" they mean run their model in a computer. they plot some graphs to show visually what they got.

NOTHING ABOUT THIS HAS BEEN SHOWN EXPERIMENTALLY OR EMPIRICALLY BY OBSERVATIONS YET

but some aspects of these models are testable and it is beginning to be time to winnow out some of these models. wolram recently found an article by some people figuring out how to test and possibly exclude some alternative ('braneworld' type) models. It is going to be a slow process, but what else can you do.

Our tradition is the slow empirical tradition. Pure inspiration does not fly. Even if you are Einstein----he proposed General Relativity in 1915 and already it was tested in 1919 with an astronomical test that could have shot it down. the tradition is you DONT BELIEVE, you take proposed theories one by one and try to shoot them down by empirical observation.

I think Ashtekar's quantum bounce model of the bang is great but I don't believe it. I just wait (as patiently as I can) for testing to check it.

 

[CosmologyHobbyist]

Thanks very much for your answer, Marcus. I did read the Ashketar paper before I posted (I'll read it again now!); I suppose I was trying to find a synopsis of current views.

 

[marcus]

Thanks very much for your answer, Marcus. I did read the Ashketar paper before I posted (I'll read it again now!); I suppose I was trying to find a synopsis of current views.

In the braneworlds picture, branes bump together repeatedly
search arxiv.org for author name Steinhardt
braneworld cosmology is very different from loop quantum gravity cosmology. (and there are other attempts too, Hawking had a quantum cosmology back in the 1980s which no one works on much but which he has popularized)

I do not know of a synopsis that harmonizes the diverse ideas.

but there is some "high level diplomacy" in the works.

In January 2007 there will be a workshop at KITP (a top string theory location) in Santa Barbara about "Quantum Spacetime Singularities" and string-cosmology people will be there but also martin Bojowald.

Bojowald is a loop guy. So the loop cosmology and stringy cosmology people will be comparing notes for a week or so on how they handle the big bang. to my mind there is no way to judge ahead of time what might, if anything, come of it

they both eliminate singularity----that is, have theories that don't fail at that point, but they are so different

to try to make a combined synopisis would somehow be unjust to both

 

[CosmologyHobbyist]

Thanks again, Marcus. I meant "summary" when I said "synopsis", and you gave me an excellent list of things to look into.

 

[hellfire]

In the braneworlds picture, branes bump together repeatedly
search arxiv.org for author name Steinhardt
braneworld cosmology is very different from loop quantum gravity cosmology. (and there are other attempts too, Hawking had a quantum cosmology back in the 1980s which no one works on much but which he has popularized)

I do not know of a synopsis that harmonizes the diverse ideas.

You might be interested in this.