What Was There Before the Big Bang?

The world was made ‘with’ time and not ‘in’ time. St. Augustine

Although the concept of big bang is fairly well accepted by the cosmologists, astrophysicists, and the physicists, the question as to what was there before the big bang continually haunts them. A simple answer to this question proposed by Paul Davies is “nothing” in the literal sense of “no thing”. According to him, matter, space and time came into existence with the big bang. There was no time before the big bang; the question “what was there before the big bang” is therefore meaningless.

Davies (1) said in a conversation, “…So this big bang thing is more than just the explosion of a lump of something in a pre-existing void. A lot of people have that misconception. They imagine something like huge empty space with a sort of cosmic egg sitting in the middle of it for all eternity – just sitting there and sitting there. Then suddenly – Bang – the whole thing flies apart, and the fragments, our galaxy being one of them, all go shooting off. Well, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong! That’s not to think of the universe.

We know that the universe is expanding. We know the galaxies are retreating from us and from each other. The whole system is getting bigger and bigger with time. How can one envisage that?…. Coming back to the idea of origin of time, the best way I can try to explain it is to invite you to imagine the expanding balloon that represents space, viewed in reversed time. As you go back in time the balloon is smaller and smaller. Imagine it shrinking down, and down, and down until it is just a little dot – a single point of space. All the fabric of the balloon is concentrated into that single point, like the apex of a cone. And that point, that apex is the end – or in this case the beginning. Beyond the point is nothing. The balloon- space – has simply disappeared. Play this scenario in forward time and it trepresents the coming-into-being of a universe from literally nothing with space itself appearing. And, for that matter, does time…. There can be no time without space. If space comes into existence abruptly at the big bang, then time comes into existence abruptly, too.”

In spite of the preceding long-winded explanation, it doesn’t seem very convincing although it is this explanation that goes around and is in circulation in the learned circles ever since the big bang theory gradually evolved. Another evasive response to this quiz is: Whatever was there before the big bang is immaterial because it did not (could not?) affect the coming-into-existence of our universe.

This is similar in essence to the proof of the existence of God from the first cause. God is said to be the first cause, the cause of all causes. Paul Davies has rejected this proof on philosophical grounds. Why stop at the first cause? What is the cause of the first cause? Or, who created God? So now why stop at the big bang? Why don’t we go beyond big bang? Some scientists are busy precisely doing that.

Steven Weinberg (2) commented in an interview, “The question always comes up ‘what was there before the big bang?’ And I spend so many minutes waffling about that, saying, ‘well, may be there was no time…’ But I share their perplexity. I find it more comfortable to think about infinite time as well as infinite space, no boundary in time any more than a boundary in space, and with everything being explained by physics without any historical elements entering into it.”

Cosmology before the Big Bang Postulation

The traditional view of the universe in the early twenties of the last century and before that was that of a static (stationary) and closed universe. The universe was bounded and was static in the sense that it was not contracting or expanding with time. Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915, which ushered a scientific revolution in cosmology. The modern cosmology is effectively relativistic cosmology. (To be more accurate, the modern cosmology is a blend of relativistic and quantum cosmologies. Quantum cosmology applies at the genesis of the universe.)

Einstein published his first cosmology paper in 1917. He was discomfited by one aspect of his theory which predicted expansion of the universe. In order to suppress this expansion and keep his universe static, he arbitrarily used a constant in his equations which was called the cosmological constant. This proved to be a momentous act of intuition although Einstein later on retracted and called it his greatest blunder. This cosmological constant has a life of its own now and no theoretical cosmological discussion is complete without it these days.

In 1922, Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann published his paper in which he pointed to the possibility of an expanding universe. This was a consequence emanating from Einstein’s theory of general relativity as seen above. He had assumed the cosmological constant to be zero. One other kind of universe that was described by him was the cyclic universe. In this, the universe went through an endless cycles of expansions and contractions.

When Einstein learned of Friedmann’s work, he did not think much of it. In fact, he suggested there might be some error in Friedmann’s paper. Friedmann assured him there was no error in his paper. Einstein accepted Friedmann’s explanation and withdrew his earlier comments but he still would not accept the concept of an expanding universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubbell published his paper based on the results of his astronomical observations in which he said that the galaxies were receding at a fast rate from us and from one another. He concluded that the universe was expanding. Einstein reluctantly accepted the idea of the expanding universe but he still was not comfortable with it.

Towards the end of 1920s (1927), Lemaitre published his work and suggested, like Friedmann, that the universe was expanding. By reversing the direction of time, he also postulated that our universe began from a super-dense ‘primeval atom’ which exploded and expanded to the present universe. This idea was so ‘outlandish’ that not many astronomers accepted it. Gradually, however, as the time passed, the idea of primeval atom sank in and the scientists stopped finding it repugnant, as in the beginning. This was the precursor of the big bang theory.

Road to Big Bang

George Gamow, a student of Alexander Friedmann, went beyond Lemaitre’s primeval atom; he went right to the super-dense singularity at zero time and suggested that the universe was created by a sudden explosion of this singularity. The singularity had zero area, infinite mass and infinite curvature and was inherently unstable. The idea seemed to be totally preposterous. Such ideas however had ceased to look bizarre after so many other strange and incredible discoveries that were made in quantum mechanics. For instance, there was antimatter, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, vacuum energy etc. After them, big bang was not such a big shocker.

After the World War 2, Gamow started work to explain the formation of elements in the big bang. He, in collaboration with Ralph Alpher, published his work in 1948, which suggested that the universe had started with a hot big bang. Its early phase was dominated by radiation, which he argued should still be lingering in the universe. He predicted such radiation to have a temperature 5 degrees K. (Gamow had a jocular rib in his make-up. He persuaded Hans Bethe to become a co-author of their paper so that he could dub it as the alpha-beta-gamma paper. Responding to the light side of this episode, Bethe accepted Gamow’s offer. The paper is now called the alpha-beta-gamma paper).

Their prediction of dispersed thermal radiation was verified in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who worked for Bell Laboratories, New Jersey. They were not particularly looking for this radiation; in fact they had probably not even heard of Gamow. They accidentally discovered the unexpected thermal radiation and thought it was some kind of ‘noise’, may be caused by the malfunctioning of their highly sensitive microwave detector equipment. They cleaned their antenna but the result wouldn’t go away; it persisted no matter in what direction they pointed their antenna. Their observations stretched over on different days and different seasons gave the same result. The temperature that they measured was about 3 degrees K. Eventually, they concluded that the cosmic background microwave radiation (CBR) that they had detected was the same that had been predicted by Gamow et al. This was iron-clad evidence in support of Gamow’s big bang theory. Penzias and Wilson were rewarded for their work by the award of Nobel Prize in 1978.

A rival theory, the steady state theory, gained much attention and publicity about the same time that Gamow had formulated his theory of sudden explosion. Fred Hoyle (who later dubbed Gamow’s theory derisively as the ‘big bang’ and the pejorative got stuck) published his work in 1948 starting with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. He combined them with a ‘creation function’ because the central piece of the steady state theory was constant creation of matter in the inter-galactic space of the expanding universe. His theory violated the principle of energy conservation, which was repaired later on.

This theory envisaged a universe which had no beginning and end in time. It was eternal. Its predictions regarding nucleosynthesis were borne out practically excepting the formation of the heavier elements such as carbon and nitrogen. It held sway for a couple of decades and had some prominent astrophysicists backing it. But interest in it dwindled after the discovery of CBR, which the steady state theory failed to predict. Hardly anybody talks about it these days.

Although the big bang theory had explained reasonably well how the universe evolved from the initial huge explosion, some problems remained which it could not explain. Most notable of these problems were:

 Flatness problem
 Horizon problem
 Monopoles problem

The flatness problem relates to the insignificant curvature of our universe. If it began from a singularity with infinite curvature, why is it so flat now? The horizon problem is related to the uniformity and homogeneity of the space. The universe looks almost the same in all directions. And lastly, theory predicts the existence of monopoles (magnets with single polarity). They have still not been found anywhere in the universe. Persistent efforts to find them have come up with nothing.

These problems were later explained by Alan Guth’s theory of inflation, which was published in 1980.

According to Liddle (3), the following are some of the compelling reasons for the success of the hot big bang theory:

 The expansion of the universe.
 The existence and spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
 The abundance of light elements in the universe (nucleosynthesis).
 That the predicted age of the universe is compatible to direct age measurements of objects within the universe.
 That given the irregularities seen in the microwave background by COBE, there exists a reasonable explanation for the development of structure in the universe through gravitational collapse.

Beyond Big Bang

The standard big bang theory, as far as cosmologists are concerned, appears to be essentially certain to all but a few of us. Inflation seems to be by far the most plausible way that the big bang could have started, but it is not so well established as the big bang itself. Alan Guth

The essence of new developments in cosmology is hard to describe comprehensibly in non-technical language. Much of it sounds like stories from the fairy land. For instance, “according to inflation theory, the universe started out smaller than a proton, then – in less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second – expanded to a size trillions of times bigger than our observable universe.” Commenting on the above observation, Andre Linde who was honored (together with Alan Guth and Paul Steinhardt) with the award of 2002 Dirac medal for his work in cosmology, said (4), “If somebody told me that 25 years ago, I would have thought he was crazy,… but that’s what we’re getting this medal for. It represents the acceptance of our theory by the general community.”

The upshot of the recent developments is that the hot big-bang is not the final story of the creation of our universe. There is enough to talk about as to what happened before the big bang.

Inflation

Einstein’s theory of general relativity becomes inapplicable close to zero time; that is the domain where quantum physics reigns. In that domain all the fundamental forces were unified and had not separated from each other. That is the reason it is believed that better explanation of the beginning of the universe will emerge from the unified theory which would hold good for both the subatomic world at the origin of time and the whole universe which evolved later on.

Alan Guth who formulated the inflation theory was investigating how to explain or skirt around the monopole problem (mentioned in the preceding), which the classical big bang theory was plagued with but could not explain, when he stumbled on to the inflation theory which not only solved the monopole problem but also explained the other problems inherent in the big bang theory as already mentioned. He explained the essence of the inflation theory as follows (5):

The key idea – underlying physics – that makes inflation possible is the fact that most modern particle theories predict that there should exist a state of matter that turns gravity on its head, creating a gravitational repulsion…Thus gravity does not always have to be attractive. The gravitational repulsion caused by this peculiar kind of material is the secret behind inflation. Inflation is the proposition that the early universe contained at least a small patch that was filled with this peculiar repulsive-gravity material.

Such a patch doesn’t have to be large. It can be only a billionth of the size of a proton. This patch then starts to expand due to its internal gravitational repulsion. The expansion is exponential. The size of the initial patch doubles in every interval of 10^-37 seconds. This doubling can occur hundreds of times. The inflation is thus seeded which provides the required initial condition for the big bang to take off.

The way the monopole problem, which triggered Guth’s investigation, was solved is described by Timothy Ferris (6) as follows:

The trouble is that in the classical big bang picture there were far too many of them (monopoles). The calculated monopole density would have made the universe dense enough to halt cosmic expansion only thirty thousand years after the big bang. Inflation obviates this difficulty by diluting the monopole density, and by sweeping those few that are produced to regions far outside the horizon of the observable universe. Enormous number of monopoles could have arisen in the inflationary universe, yet we and all other observers would find them to be observationally far rarer than snowballs in the Sahara. Calculations suggest that inflation would spread them so thin that the average observer could expect to find only a single monopole in the entire observable universe.

Eternal and Chaotic Inflations

At the time Alan Guth developed his inflation theory which is now called classical inflation, a Russian scientist Andre Linde was working with similar ideas. He is credited with the concept of eternal and chaotic inflations. These concepts lead to the creation of many universes which are independent of one another. Starting with a tiny patch of repulsive gravity material, a “pocket universe” is created from one of its bits which takes a life of its own and can sprout other universes also. The remaining bit of the original material can again develop and divide giving birth to another pocket universe and the process continues. This indeed is a Pandora ’s Box. It is difficult to describe these ideas in any detail herein; the interested reader can himself (herself) research and find suitable reading material (or use some of the references quoted in this paper) for further reading. The intent here was to draw attention to the new venues and alleys which the ongoing research is exploring.

According to Guth (7), “By eternal inflation, I mean simply that once inflation starts, it never ends. The term future-eternal would be more precise, because I am not claiming that it is eternal into the past…”

If the expansion of the universe is still accelerating as reported by me in my previous paper (8) on Chowk “Dark Mysteries of our Mysterious Universe”, it means the universe is still inflating though not necessarily at the same explosive rate as it did near the origin of time.

The Big Splatt

This concept is due to Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok and is the most recent development in the theories of the origin of the universe. They call their universe as the ‘ekpyrotic’ universe after the Greek word ekpyrosis which denotes the fiery death and rebirth of the world in Stoic philosophy.

According to this concept, the action of the universe takes place in five-dimensional space. Before the big bang occurred the universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces (branes of the superstring theory). One of these sheets is our universe; the other, a ‘hidden’ parallel universe. Random fluctuations in this unseen universe caused it to distort and reach toward our universe. The floater splatted into our universe and the energy of the collision was transformed into the matter and energy for our universe in a big bang (9).

According to this new proposal, the universe is cyclic (as first described by Friedmann in 1922) and undergoes an endless sequence of big ‘crunches’ and big bangs. Our big bang is thus not the origin of time. Time existed before the big bang also.

This model is derived from the superstring theory and is still in the early stages of scrutiny. Some notable cosmologists have severely criticized it. According to Andre Linde (now at Stanford University, California), “It’s a very bad idea popular only among journalists. It’s an extremely complicated theory and simply does not work.”

Conclusion

I conclude this paper with an observation made by the University of California, Santa Cruz, Cosmologist, Professor Joel Primack (10), “The Big Bang is real, inflation is speculation, and eternal inflation is speculation upon speculation. But it’s the best way I know to approach the issue of the beginning of time.” In other words, the jury is still out. This is the beauty of science. It’s like peeling an onion. You remove one skin and encounter the next. Towards the end of the last century, people were talking about end of physics and end of science. The fact however is that there is no end of physics or of science.

References

1. In Conversation with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams, http://www.abc.net.au/science/bigquestion/s460625.htm
2. Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer, “ Steven Weinberg in Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 451-466.
3. Andrew R. Liddle, et al, “An Introduction to Cosmological Inflation,” arxiv:astro-ph/9901124v1 11jan 1999.
4. Mark Shwarz, “Cosmologist Andrei Linde awarded 2002 Dirac Medal for Theoretical Physics,” Stanford Report, September 11, 2002, http:////news-service.stanford.edu/news/september11/dirac-911.htm
5. Alan Guth, “How Does Inflation Work?” http://www.counterbalance.net/eq-guth/howdo-body.htm
6. Timothy Ferris, “The Whole Shebang,” Simons and Schuster, New York, 1997, pp. 234-235.
7. Alan Guth, “Eternal Inflation: Mechanisms,” http://counterbalance.net/cq-guth/etern-body.htm
8. Mohammad Gill, “Dark Mysteries of Our Mysterious Universe,” http://www.chowk.com, December 28, 2003.
9. BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse, “Before the Big Bang,” April 10, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/127726.stm
10. Robert Irion, “When did time begin?” http;//www.ucsc.edu/oncampus/currents/97-02-17/primack.htm