The Pre-Big Bang Universe: The Origin of Matter and Energy from the Vacuum

[Habeeb03]

What presents before big bang? and how energy, matter and everything come from without nothing.

 

[marcus]

What presents before big bang? and how energy, matter and everything come from without nothing.

What preceded the big bang (the beginning of the expansion) is the subject of much current research. A book called Beyond the Big Bang will be published this year by Springer Verlag in Germany, edited by Ruediger Vaas, with contributions by 20 or so authors.

the most highly cited research on this is by Martin Bojowald and Abhay Ashtekar.
Both have published many peer-reviewed papers on this and have cited by many other scientists. They use both computer models of the big bang and analytical models.

In their work, as in that of many other researchers, the big bang does NOT proceed from "nothing". that is something that you read in popularized accounts, it is more of a legend than a scientific description.

in the models used in current research, energy matter etc were present before what we call the big bang (i.e. the beginning of the expansion which we are now witnessing)

To find out more about the big bang, try this Scientific American article
Misconceptions about the big bang March 2005. Here is a PDF.


http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~aes/AST105/Readings/misconceptionsBigBang.pdf

Here is an HTML link to the same article

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147

The article had some very useful SIDEBARS giving pictorial diagrams with a question together with right and wrong answers explained. For easier access, here are links to individual sidebars.

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p39.gif
What kind of explosion was the big bang?

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p40.gif
Can galaxies recede faster than light?

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p42.gif
Can we see galaxies receding faster than light?

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p43.gif
Why is there a cosmic redshift?

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p44.gif
How large is the observable universe?

http://www.sciam.com/media/inline/0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147_p45.gif
Do objects inside the universe expand, too?

 

[cristo]

I think there should be a sticky in the cosmology forum, linking to the misconceptions article and any other relevant articles, since there seem to be many threads started each day that could be answered by that article. It would also stop people (like marcus) having to provide the references in each reply!

Anyway, I'm just thinking aloud.. don't mind me!

 

[JTankers]

Cosmological observations provide an incredibly rich set of clues to the pre-big bang universe. Do you see any flaws in: The Pre-Big Bang Universe at BigCrash.org?

… In the beginning (in the pre-big bang universe) there was only the vast vacuum of space and time. But this vacuum was not sterile, it was seething with vacuum energy. This vacuum energy field permeates and defines the universe, an astronomically large sphere of energy. And just as matter generates gravity by warping space and time, so does energy and this is the force that defines the size and shape of the universe, and also the force that bestows mass on matter…

…When a virtual matter/anti-matter pair becomes a matter matter pair, the virtual particles are no longer able to mutually annihilate and they become real, stealing energy from the vacuum energy of space. This is the mechanism of slow matter creation in the first phase of the pre-big bang universe. Over perhaps a billion billion years, clouds of matter form over the entire universe, and eventually coalesce into cosmological bodies and eventually the first pre-big bang black hole, which starts the second phase of the pre-big bang universe, fast accretion of matter from vacuum energy by black holes…