It might seem a bit counterintuitive, but it’s true. Dark matter got its name because we aren’t able to see it. It doesn’t interact directly with electromagnetic radiation, so the detectors on our telescopes just can’t spot it. But it does interact with gravity, and by using gravity, we can spot where it’s hiding and, potentially, what influence it has on our universe.
To see the effects of the gravity generated by dark matter throughout the universe, cosmologists turned to another elusive area of interest—cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The CMB is radiation that permeates the universe, originating from just after the Big Bang.
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It’s diffuse, it’s everywhere, and it can be moved around by gravity—a perfect candidate for showing off the power and distribution of dark matter. So, a team of researchers decided to use the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to map the CMB over about a fourth of the sky and see how it’s affected by sources of gravity like dark matter.
“We’ve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang,” Mathew Madhavacheril, one of the researchers who worked on the project, said in a press release. “Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe, and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what you’d expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einstein’s theory of gravity.”
A confirmation of “lumpiness” doesn’t necessarily sound like a big deal, but it’s actually a significant point in favor of one side of a major cosmological debate. Sometimes called “The Crisis in Cosmology,” it’s a disagreement about how “lumpy”—or unevenly distributed—dark matter should be. According to measurements of dark matter’s distribution taken from starlight instead of CMB, the mystery substance isn’t “lumpy” enough to agree with the standard model of cosmology (ΛCDM). That disagreement would imply that ΛCDM is wrong, and would throw a serious wrench in our understanding of the deep universe.
But according to this most recent CMB-dark matter map, ΛCDM is doing just fine. “While earlier studies pointed to cracks in the standard cosmological model, our findings provide new reassurance that our fundamental theory of the universe holds true,” Frank Qu, a Ph.D. student and one of the researchers on the project, said in a news release.
Suzanne Staggs, another researcher on the project, added in the release that she believes combining the starlight-based calculations with the new map will provide “an extraordinary opportunity to use these different data sets together. Our map includes all of the dark matter, going back to the Big Bang, and the other maps are looking back about 9 billion years, giving us a layer that is much closer to us. We can compare the two to learn about the growth of structures in the universe. I think is going to turn out to be really interesting. That the two approaches are getting different measurements is fascinating.
In any case, the map is a huge success, marking the beginning of the end of a project about 20 years in the making. The team is now looking forward to seeing what other groups do with their data, and anticipates being able to make even more efficient maps with the upcoming Simons Observatory.
“When we proposed this experiment in 2003, we had no idea the full extent of information that could be extracted from our telescope,” Mark Devlin, another of the researchers on the project, said in a press release. “We owe this to the cleverness of the theorists, the many people who built new instruments to make our telescope more sensitive, and the new analysis techniques our team came up with.”
Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, famed for his work on black holes, claims we’ve seen evidence from a prior Universe. Only, we haven’t.
Penrose’s idea of a conformal cyclic cosmology hypothesizes that our Universe arose from a pre-existing Universe that would leave imprints on our cosmos today. This is a fascinating and imaginative alternative to inflation, but the data doesn’t support it, despite Penrose’s dubious claims that it does.
Key Takeaways
The original Big Bang has since been modified to include an early inflationary phase, pushing whatever came before inflation to an unobservable place.
When inflation ends, the hot Big Bang ensues, and we can see evidence from the final tiny fraction-of-a-second of inflation imprinted on our observable Universe.
However, we can’t see anything from before that time. Despite the assertions of one of the most famous living physicists, there’s no evidence for a Universe prior to that.
One of the greatest scientific successes of the past century was the theory of the hot Big Bang: the idea that the Universe, as we observe it and exist within it today, emerged from a hotter, denser, more uniform past. Originally proposed as a serious alternative to some of the more mainstream explanations for the expanding Universe, it was shockingly confirmed in the mid-1960s with the discovery of the “primeval fireball” that remained from that early, hot-and-dense state: today known as the Cosmic Microwave Background.
For more than 50 years, the Big Bang has reigned supreme as the theory describing our cosmic origins, with an early, inflationary period preceding it and setting it up. Both cosmic inflation and the Big Bang have been continually challenged by astronomers and astrophysicists, but the alternatives have fallen away each time that new, critical observations have come in. Even 2020 Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose’s attempted alternative, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, cannot match the inflationary Big Bang’s successes. Contrary to many years of headlines and Penrose’s continued assertions, we see no evidence of “a Universe before the Big Bang.”
(Credit: E. Siegel; ESA/Planck and the DOE/NASA/NSF Interagency Task Force on CMB research)
The Big Bang is commonly presented as though it were the beginning of everything: space, time, and the origin of matter and energy. From a certain archaic point of view, this makes sense. If the Universe we see is expanding and getting less dense today, then that means it was smaller and denser in the past. If radiation — things like photons — is present in that Universe, then the wavelength of that radiation will stretch as the Universe expands, meaning it cools as time goes on and was hotter in the past.
At some point, if you extrapolate back far enough, you’ll achieve densities, temperatures, and energies that are so great that you’ll create the conditions for a singularity. If your distance scales are too small, your timescales are too short, or your energy scales are too high, the laws of physics cease to make sense. If we run the clock backward some 13.8 billion years toward the mythical “0” mark, those laws of physics break down at a time of ~10-43 seconds: the Planck time.
If this were an accurate depiction of the Universe — that it began hot and dense and then expanded and cooled — we’d expect a large number of transitions to occur in our past history.
All the possible particles and antiparticles would get created in great numbers, with the excess annihilating away to radiation when it gets too cool to continually create them.
The electroweak and Higgs symmetries break when the Universe cools below the energy at which those symmetries are restored, creating four fundamental forces and particles with non-zero rest masses.
Quarks and gluons condense to form composite particles like protons and neutrons.
Neutrinos stop interacting efficiently with the surviving particles.
Protons and neutrons fuse to form the light nuclei: deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7.
Gravitation works to grow the overdense regions, while radiation pressure works to expand them when they get too dense, creating a set of oscillatory, scale-dependent imprints.
And approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it becomes cool enough to form neutral, stable atoms without them being instantly blasted apart.
When this last stage occurs, the photons permeating the Universe, which had previously scattered off of the free electrons, simply travel in a straight line, lengthening in wavelength and diluting in number as the Universe expands.
(Credit: Amanda Yoho for Starts With A Bang)
Back in the mid-1960s, this background of cosmic radiation was first detected, catapulting the Big Bang from one of a few viable options for our Universe’s origin to the only one consistent with the data. While most astronomers and astrophysicists immediately accepted the Big Bang, the strongest proponents of the leading alternative Steady-State theory — people like Fred Hoyle — came up with progressively more and more absurd contentions to defend their discredited idea in the face of overwhelming data.
But each idea failed spectacularly. It couldn’t have been tired starlight, nor reflected light, nor dust that was heated up and radiating. Each and every explanation that was tried was refuted by the data: the spectrum of this cosmic afterglow was too perfect a blackbody, too equal in all directions, and too uncorrelated with the matter in the Universe to line up with these alternative explanations. While science moved on to the Big Bang becoming part of the consensus, i.e., a sensible starting point for future science, Hoyle and his ideological allies worked to hold back the progress of science by advocating for scientifically untenable alternatives.
Ultimately, science moved on while the contrarians became more and more irrelevant, with their trivially incorrect work fading into obscurity and their research program eventually ceasing upon their deaths.
In the meantime, from the 1960s up through the 2000s, the sciences of astronomy and astrophysics — and particularly the sub-field of cosmology, which focuses on the history, growth, evolution, and fate of the Universe — grew spectacularly.
We mapped out the large-scale structure of the Universe, discovering a great cosmic web.
We discovered how galaxies grew and evolved, and how their stellar populations inside changed with time.
We learned that all the known forms of matter and energy in the Universe were insufficient to explain everything we observe: some form of dark matter and some form of dark energy are required.
And we were able to further verify additional predictions of the Big Bang, such as the predicted abundances of the light elements, the presence of a population of primordial neutrinos, and the discovery of density imperfections of exactly the necessary type to grow into the large-scale structure of the Universe we observe today.
(Credit: E.M. Huff, SDSS-III/South Pole Telescope, Zosia Rostomian)
At the same time, there were observations that were no doubt true, but that the Big Bang had no predictive power to explain. The Universe allegedly reached these arbitrarily high temperatures and high energies at the earliest times, and yet there are no exotic leftover relics that we can see today: no magnetic monopoles, no particles from grand unification, no topological defects, etc. Theoretically, something else beyond what is known must be out there to explain the Universe we see, but if they ever existed, they’ve been hidden from us.
The Universe, in order to exist with the properties we see, must have been born with a very specific expansion rate: one that balanced the total energy density exactly, to more than 50 significant digits. The Big Bang has no explanation for why this should be the case.
And the only way different regions of space would have the same exact temperature is if they’re in thermal equilibrium: if they have time to interact and exchange energy. Yet the Universe is too big and has expanded in such a way that we have many causally disconnected regions. Even at the speed of light, those interactions couldn’t have taken place.
This presents a tremendous challenge for cosmology and for science in general. In science, when we see some phenomena that our theories cannot explain, we have two options.
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We can attempt to devise a theoretical mechanism to explain those phenomena, while simultaneously maintaining all the successes of the prior theory and making novel predictions that are distinct from the prior theory’s predictions.
Or we can simply assume that there is no explanation, and the Universe was simply born with the properties necessary to give us the Universe we observe.
Only the first approach has scientific value, and therefore that’s the one that must be tried, even if it fails to yield fruit. The most successful theoretical mechanism for extending the Big Bang has been cosmic inflation, which sets up a phase before the Big Bang where the Universe expanded in an exponential fashion: stretching it flat, giving it the same properties everywhere, matching the expansion rate with the energy density, eliminating any prior high-energy relics, and making the new prediction of quantum fluctuations — leading to a specific type of density and temperature fluctuations — superimposed atop an otherwise uniform Universe.
Although inflation, like the Big Bang before it, had a large number of detractors, it succeeds where all the alternatives fail. It solves the “graceful exit” problem, where an exponentially expanding Universe can transition into a matter-and-radiation-filled Universe that expands in a way that matches our observations, meaning it can reproduce all the successes of the hot Big Bang. It imposes an energy cutoff, eliminating any ultra-high-energy relics. It creates a uniform Universe to an enormously high degree, where the expansion rate and the total energy density match perfectly.
And it makes novel predictions about the types of structure and the initial temperature and density fluctuations that should appear, predictions that have subsequently been borne out to be correct by observations. Inflation’s predictions were largely teased out in the 1980s, while the observational evidence that validated it has come in a trickling stream over the past ~30 years. Although alternatives abound, none are as successful as inflation.
Unfortunately, Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, although his work on General Relativity, black holes, and singularities in the 1960s and 1970s was absolutely Nobel-worthy, has spent a large amount of his efforts in recent years on a crusade to overthrow inflation: by promoting a vastly scientifically inferior alternative, his pet idea of a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or CCC.
The biggest predictive difference is that the CCC pretty much requires that an imprint of “the Universe before the Big Bang” show itself in both the Universe’s large-scale structure and in the cosmic microwave background: the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Contrariwise, inflation demands that anywhere inflation ends and a hot Big Bang arises must be causally disconnected from, and cannot interact with, any prior, current, or future such region. Our Universe exists with properties that are independent of any other.
The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly, it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data, and the CCC is quite clearly not.
(Credit: V.G. Gurzadyan & R. Penrose, Eur. J. Phys. Plus, 2013)
Although, much like Hoyle, Penrose isn’t alone in his assertions, the data is overwhelmingly opposed to what he contends. The predictions that he’s made are refuted by the data, and his claims to see these effects are only reproducible if one analyzes the data in a scientifically unsound and illegitimate fashion. Hundreds of scientists have pointed this out to Penrose — repeatedly and consistently over a period of more than 10 years — who continues to ignore the field and plow ahead with his contentions.
Like many before him, he appears to have fallen so in love with his own ideas that he no longer looks to reality to responsibly test them. Yet these tests exist, the critical data is publicly available, and Penrose is not just wrong, it’s trivially easy to demonstrate that the features he claims should be present in the Universe do not exist. Hoyle may have been denied a Nobel Prize despite his worthy contributions to stellar nucleosynthesis because of his unscientific stances later in life; although Penrose now has a Nobel, he has succumbed to the same regrettable pitfall.
While we should laud the creativity of Penrose and celebrate his groundbreaking, Nobel-worthy work, we must guard ourselves against the urge to deify any great scientist, or the work they engage in that isn’t supported by the data. In the end, regardless of celebrity or fame, it’s up to the Universe itself to discern for us what’s real and what’s merely an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and for us to follow the Universe’s lead, regardless of where it takes us.
Remember the philosophical argument our universe is a simulation? Well, a team of astrophysicists say they’ve created the biggest simulated universe yet. But you won’t find any virtual beings in it—or even planets or stars.
The simulation is 9.6 billion light-years to a side, so its smallest structures are still enormous (the size of small galaxies). The model’s 2.1 trillion particles simulate the dark matter glue holding the universe together.
Named Uchuu, or Japanese for “outer space,” the simulation covers some 13.8 billion years and will help scientists study how dark matter has driven cosmic evolution since the Big Bang.
Dark matter is mysterious—we’ve yet to pin down its particles—and yet it’s also one of the most powerful natural phenomena known. Scientists believe it makes up 27 percent of the universe. Ordinary matter—stars, planets, you, me—comprise less than 5 percent. Cosmic halos of dark matter resist the dark energy pulling the universe apart, and they drive the evolution of large-scale structures, from the smallest galaxies to the biggest galaxy clusters.
Of course, all this change takes an epic amount of time. It’s so slow that, to us, the universe appears as a still photograph. So scientists make simulations. But making a 3D video of almost the entire universe takes computer power. A lot of it. Uchuu commandeered all 40,200 processors in astronomy’s biggest supercomputer, ATERUI II, for a solid 48 hours a month over the course of a year. The results are gorgeous and useful. “Uchuu is like a time machine,” said Julia F. Ereza, a PhD student at IAA-CSIC.
“We can go forward, backward, and stop in time. We can ‘zoom in’ on a single galaxy or ‘zoom out’ to visualize a whole cluster. We can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the Universe from its earliest days to the present…”
Perhaps the coolest part is that the team compressed the whole thing down to a relatively manageable size of 100 terabytes and made it available to anyone. Obviously, most of us won’t have that kind of storage lying around, but many researchers likely will.
This isn’t the first—and won’t be the last—mind-bogglingly big simulation.
Rather, Uchuu is the latest member of a growing family tree dating back to 1970, when Princeton’s Jim Peebles simulated 300 “galaxy” particles on then-state-of-the-art computers.
While earlier simulations sometimes failed to follow sensible evolutionary paths—spawning mutant galaxies or rogue black holes—with the advent of more computing power and better code, they’ve become good enough to support serious science. Some go big. Others go detailed. Increasingly, one needn’t preclude the other.
Every few years, it seems, astronomers break new ground. In 2005, the biggest simulated universe was 10 billion particles; by 2011, it was 374 billion. More recently, the Illustris TNG project has unveiled impressively detailed (and yet still huge) simulations.
Scientists hope that by setting up the universe’s early conditions and physical laws and then hitting play, their simulations will reproduce the basic features of the physical universe as we see it. This lends further weight to theories of cosmology and also helps explain or even make predictions about current and future observations.
Astronomers expect Uchuu will help them interpret galaxy surveys from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope, due for launch in 2022. Simulations in hand, scientists will refine the story of how all this came to be, and where it’s headed.
Physicists have discovered that gravity and quantum effects disrupt the symmetry of the electromagnetic field, making symmetry impossible in our universe. If true, the work will add insight to the study of the origins of the universe.
GRAVITY AND ELECTROMAGNETISM
New research from physicists at Louisiana State University (LSU) and Universidad de Valencia, Spain, may offer the answer to questions left open by classical theories of electromagnetism. If this new research solves part of this mystery, it may also provide a window into the origins of the universe.
Waves of all kinds, including light, are made of magnetic and electric fields. For around 150 years, scientists have accepted the idea that magnetism and electricity are really just two sides of the same coin. When Michael Faraday spun magnets, generating electricity — and used electrical currents to make magnets spin — the connection seemed obvious. James Clerk Maxwell took the experiments of Faraday and turned them into the classical theory of electromagnetism, which provided a unified framework for studying optics, magnetism, and electricity.
The mystery of electromagnetism lies in the absence of magnetic charges. Maxwell’s theory, referred to as the electric-magnetic duality, rests on a concept of symmetry and assumes that magnets having charges. However, no isolated magnetic charges have ever been observed in nature, and while something that behaves in a similar way has been simulated in laboratories, this is scarcely the same as actual empirical evidence. If magnetic charges don’t exist, then Maxwell’s theory of symmetry is impossible.
Now, LSU’s Ivan Agullo and his team of researchers think they know why these isolated magnetic charges, also called magnetic monopoles, have never been found: gravity and quantum effects disrupt the symmetry of the electromagnetic field.
“Gravity spoils the symmetry regardless of whether magnetic monopoles exist or not,” Agullo said in a press release from LSU. “This is shocking. The bottom line is that the symmetry cannot exist in our universe at the fundamental level because gravity is everywhere.”
STUDYING THE UNIVERSE’S BIRTH
This new research challenges many basic scientific premises that may affect other research, including the study of the origins of the universe. Satellites collect data from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation emitted from the Big Bang and which holds valuable clues about the history of the universe.
“By measuring the CMB, we get precise information on how the Big Bang happened,” Agullo said in the press release.
Until now, scientists analyzing CMB data have assumed that the gravitational field in the universe does not affect the polarization of photons in the CMB. However, this is only true if electromagnetic symmetry exists. If it doesn’t, cosmic evolution may be changing the polarization of the CMB constantly.
Should this research be accurate, scientists will need to analyze CMB data in new ways. The team’s focus for future work will be the identification of just how much the polarization may be changing, and how scientists can adjust their analyses to cope with this new asymmetrical reality.
There’s no shortage of theories when it comes to determining the true nature of our reality. We are like a race with amnesia, searching for an answer that most probably exists, but has yet to be discovered. How did the universe begin?
Well, according to new research, it may not have begun through a Big Bang. Instead, the universe may simply have always existed. Derived from the mathematics of general relativity, the theory compliments Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. As the study’s co-author Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University explains, “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there.”
The Big Bang Theory postulates that everything in existence resulted from a single event that launched the creation of the entire universe and that everything in existence today was once part of a single, infinitely dense point, also known as the “singularity.”
Below is a model for this theory.
With this diagram in mind, the most pressing question then becomes, who or what is the thing blowing the balloon that is our universe? Who is the guy?
According to Nassim Haramein, the Director of Research for the Resonance Project: ” ‘For every action there is an equal opposite reaction.’ is one of the most foundational and proven concepts in all of physics. Therefore, if the universe is expanding then ‘the guy’ (or whatever ‘he’ is), who is blowing up that balloon, has to have some huge lungs that are contracting to be able to blow it up” (source).
This marks just one out of many criticisms of the Big Bang Theory, but there is so much more to consider. Can something come from nothing? What about quantum mechanics and the possibility that there is no moment of time in which the universe did not exist?
The theory also suggests that there are no singularities or dark matter, and that the universe is filled with a “quantum fluid,” which is filled with gravitons. According to Phys.org:
The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.
In a related paper, Das and another collaborator, Rajat Bhaduri of McMaster University, Canada, have lent further credence to this model. They show that gravitons can form a Bose-Einstein condensate (named after Einstein and another Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose) at temperatures that were present in the universe at all epochs. (source)
As you can see, when quantum mechanics are thrown into the equation, everything changes. This new theory suggests that the universe could have always existed and there is no “beginning” as we understand it. Perhaps it was just an event that did occur that we perceive as the beginning, or perhaps the event occurred not from nothing, but from something. Again, who is that guy blowing on the balloon in the picture? There is something there that has yet to be discovered.
“As far as we can see, since different points in the universe never actually converged in the past, it did not have a beginning. It lasted forever. It will also not have an end…In other words, there is no singularity. The universe could have lasted forever. It could have gone through cycles of being small and big. Or it could have been created much earlier.”
– Study co-author Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada (source)
What We Know Is Often Just Theory
It’s clear that we do not yet have a solid explanation for what happened during the Big Bang, or proof that it even happened at all. This new theory combines general relativity with quantum mechanics to make a new and interesting case for our universe’s history, but at the end of the day, it remains a theory.
Theories about multiple dimensions, multiple universes, and more have to be considered as well. When looking for the starting point of creation, our own universe might not even be the place to start — a difficult idea to consider given that we cannot yet perceive other factors that have played a part in the makeup of what we call reality. Harder to grasp still is the fact that quantum physics is showing that the true nature and makeup of the universe is not a physical, material thing!
There is still simply too much we don’t understand, and there are new findings in modern day physics that delve into non-materialistic science that many mainstream materialistic scientists have yet to grasp and acknowledge.
I’ll leave you with a quote that might give you something to think about:
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a ‘mental’ construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: ‘The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.’ ”
– (R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29, 2005)
“Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension and even anger.”
– (T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37-43, 2001)
Science classes the world over teach that the Big Bang is the beginning of our universe, as if it’s established fact. In reality, it’s a theory and one that’s been challenged periodically. In the last few years, two teams of scientists have revived the debate, and offer fascinating alternative models. A recent paper published in the journal Nature, even goes so far as to suggest that the Big Bang was a “mirage.”
This paper was written by astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi and colleagues, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. They built upon the work of physicist Gia Dvali at the Ludwig Maximillian’s University in Munich, Germany. Physicists have some evidence that the Big Bang took place.
For instance, microwave radiation lurking in the background suggests an apocryphal explosion some 13.7 billion years ago, when the Big Bang is said to have taken place. The fact that the universe is still expanding also suggests that all things came from a common point, strengthening the accepted theory. But what happened before it took place has always been a mystery.
Today, we’re told is that everything began with an unimaginably hot, infinitely dense point in space, which did not adhere to the standard laws of physics. This is known as the singularity. But almost nothing is known about it. Afshordi points out in an interview in Nature, “For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity.” Mathematically, the Big Bang itself holds up. But equations can only show us what happened after, not before.
Background radiation in the universe.
Since the singularity doesn’t fit into normal, predictable physics models and can’t offer a glimpse into its own origins, some scientists are searching for other answers. Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, in Egypt, calls the singularity, “the most serious problem of general relativity.”
He collaborated with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, in Canada, to investigate. In 2015, they released a series of equations which describe the universe, not as an object with a beginning and an end, but as a constantly flowing river, devoid of all boundaries.
There was no Big Bang in this view and similarly no “Big Crunch,” or a time when the universe might stop expanding and begin condensing. They published their work in the journal Physics Letters B, and plan to introduce a follow-up study. The paper attempts a Herculean feat, to heal the rift between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
In this view, the universe began when it filled with gravitons as a bath fills with water. These don’t contain any mass themselves but pass gravity on to other particles. From there, this “quantum fluid” spread out and the speed of expansion accelerated.
So far, it remains a hypothesis which must undergo a battery of tests, before it can compete with or supersede the present model. This isn’t the only challenge to currently accepted theory.
Currently accepted model. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Caltech.
To get a better idea on how the universe began, Prof. Afshordi and his team created a 3D model it, floating inside a 4D model of “bulk space.” Remember, the fourth dimension is space-time. This 3D model resembled a membrane, so scientists named it the “brane.” Next, they examined stars within the model and realized that over time, some would die off in violent supernova, turning into 4D black holes.
Black holes have an edge called the event horizon. Reach it and nothing will save you from being pulled in. Nothing escapes its omnipotent pull, not light, not even stars. We think of an event horizon as a corona around a black hole, as it is usually represented in 2D images. Everything in space is 3D (4D actually). So it isn’t a ring, but an outer layer of the black hole’s surface.
Afshordi ran the model to see what would happen when a 4D black hole swallowed a 4D star. A 3D brane fired out, as a result. What’s more, the ejected material began expanding in space. So the universe may be the result of a violent interaction between a star and a black hole.
Ashfordi said, “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage.”
To learn more about one alternate theory to the Big Bang, click here:
When it comes to the science regarding the true nature of our reality, you won’t find a shortage of theories, or a shortage of criticisms of each theory. We are like a race with amnesia, trying to discover and search for an answer that most probably exists, but has yet to be discovered. How did the universe begin?
According to new research, there might not have been a big bang. Instead, the universe might have existed forever. The theory was derived from the mathematics of general relativity, and compliment Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there.” – Ahmed Farag Ali, Benha University, Co-Author of the study. (source)
The big bang theory postulates that everything in existence resulted from a single event that launched the creation of the entire universe and that everything in existence today was once part of a single infinitely dense point, also known as the “singularity.”
Here is a good picture representing what the big bang theory is referring to.
So the big bang, again, postulates that the universe started out as an infinitely small point in space called a singularity, then exploded and created space where there was no space before, and that it is continually expanding. One big question regarding that expansion is; how did it happen? As you can see in the picture, “who is that guy?
According to Nassim Haramein, the Director of Research for the Resonance Project
“For every action there is an equal opposite reaction.” is one of the most foundational and proven concepts in all of physics. Therefore, if the universe is expanding then “the guy” (or whatever “he” is), who is blowing up that balloon, has to have some huge lungs that are contracting to be able to blow it up. This a concept that Nassim Haramein began exploring when creating an alternative unified field theory to explain the universe.” (source)
This is one out of many criticisms regarding the big bang theory. There are many considerations to be pondered. Can something come from nothing? What about quantum mechanics and the possibility that there is no moment of time at which the universe did not exist?
Again, so many considerations to be pondered.
According to Phys.org:
“The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.In a related paper, Das and another collaborator, Rajat Bhaduri of McMaster University, Canada, have lent further credence to this model. They show that gravitons can form a Bose-Einstein condensate (named after Einstein and another Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose) at temperatures that were present in the universe at all epochs.” (source)
The theory also suggests (obviously) that there are no singularities or dark matter, and that the universe is filled with a “quantum fluid.” These scientists are suggesting that this quantum fluid is filled with gravitons.
According to Phys.org:
“In a related paper, Das and another collaborator, Rajat Bhaduri of McMaster University, Canada, have lent further credence to this model. They show that gravitons can form a Bose-Einstein condensate (named after Einstein and another Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose) at temperatures that were present in the universe at all epochs.”
As you can see, when quantum mechanics is thrown into the equation things appear to be far different. Again, this new theory is suggesting that the universe could have always existed, that it never was what we perceive to be as “the beginning.” Perhaps it was just an event that did occur that we perceive as the beginning, perhaps the event occurred not from nothing, but something. Again, who is that guy blowing on the balloon in the picture? There is something there that has yet to be discovered.
“As far as we can see, since different points in the universe never actually converged in the past, it did not have a beginning. It lasted forever. It will also not have an end, in other words, there is no singularity. The universe could have lasted forever. It could have gone through cycles of being small and big. or it could have been created much earlier.” – Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, Co-Author of the study. (source)
What We Know Is Often Just Theory
To conclude, it’s clear that we do not yet have a solid explanation regarding what happened during the Big Bang, or if it even happened at all. This new theory is combining general relativity with quantum mechanics, and at the end of the day these are all just theories.
Not to mention the fact that theories regarding multiple dimensions, multiple universes and more have to be considered. When looking for the starting point of creation, our own universe might not even be the place to start. It might be hard given the fact that we cannot yet perceive other factors that have played a part in the make up of what we call reality. What is even harder is the fact that quantum physics is showing that the true nature and make up of the universe is not a physical material thing!
We just don’t know yet, and there are still new findings in modern day physics that delve into non-materialistic science that many mainstream materialistic scientists have yet to grasp and acknowledge.
I’ll leave you with a quote that might give you something to think about:
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29, 2005)
“Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension and even anger. (T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37-43, 2001)
New study gives an astonishing answer to the eternal question of how the world began. Two astrophysicists argue that the Big Bang may never have happened, meaning the universe may have existed forever.
The model they suggest complements Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum corrections, and could also explain dark matter and dark energy.
It’s needless to say that this hypothesis on the origin of the universe is drastically different from most modern cosmological models. One of the most popular ones, the Big Bang theory, suggests that the universe began from a single, infinitely dense point known as the “singularity,” which began to expand 13.8 billion years ago resulting in a “Big Bang.” This is when the universe began according to the proponents of this model.
The Big Bang theory is derived from the mathematics of general relativity, but there are some weak points in it, since it can only explain what happened immediately after the Big Bang, but not before.
Now, Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt, in collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, came up with a series of equations that present an eternal universe with no beginning nor end.
In their work, Ali and Das used the ideas of David Bohm, American theoretical physicist, to make quantum corrections to an equation developed by Indian physicist Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (the so-called Raychaudhuri’s equation), thus combining elements from both quantum mechanics and general relativity. As a result, they got a universe that was much smaller in the past, but never existed as the infinite density point.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” says Ali.
What about dark energy and dark matter? It is another unsolved mystery of the universe that has been torturing scientific minds for years, as it has been confirmed that dark matter together with dark energy form approximately 95% of the total content of the universe, but yet so little is known about these mysterious phenomena.
Here Das and Ali’s model suggests that dark energy and dark matter may be derived from a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in which particles display macroscopic quantum phenomena. This condensate existed in the early universe and may have been formed by gravitons – hypothetical particles that flood the universe and carry gravity but have no mass.
Of course, the model suggested by Ali and Das is not a full theory of quantum gravity, but it is another major attempt to unite quantum theory and general relativity, which has been one of the most significant challenges in physics for the last decades.
Featured image: This is an artist’s concept of the metric expansion of space, where space (including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe) is represented at each time by the circular sections.
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