(ORDO NEWS) — Our universe is approximately 14 billion years old. At this time, according to rough estimates, there was a Big Bang.
But what was before this phenomenon and what is actually the Big Bang, because in fact it was not an explosion at all.
What is the Big Bang
We all know very well that the beginning of our Universe is the so-called Big Bang, but not everyone knows that in fact there was no explosion. What do we think of when we hear the word “explosion”?
Usually these are clouds of flame and smoke, and pieces of debris flying in different directions, and, of course, a movie character who never looks back.
What gave rise to our Universe is rightly called an expansion, and the only thing that makes this moment related to an explosion is the nature of the phenomenon that happened abruptly. So “Big Bang” is just the name of an event that was really a sudden expansion of space itself in every part of it.
How it all began
In the beginning, the universe was infinitely small. Everything around us – what galaxies, stars, planets are made of, me writing this text and you reading it – was squeezed together, forming the so-called singularity. A singularity has been defined as “a point in spacetime where the laws of physics as we know them break down.”
For some unknown reason, this singularity quickly expanded into the universe we now call home. After this rapid expansion, our universe began to cool, leaving behind a trail known as the cosmic microwave background.
As you can see, every phenomenon in the universe is a consequence of the previous event. So if the Big Bang caused the cosmic microwave background, there must be something that caused the Big Bang itself.
What happened before the Big Bang
Causality is one of the main postulates of physics, set forth in the Law of Conservation of Energy. As you know, energy does not arise from anywhere and does not disappear without a trace, but passes from one state to another.
In the world around us, all effects must have a cause. Take, for example, a fallen tree. Perhaps a fierce storm overthrew it, or a series of successive events caused it to fall. However, the quantum world of atoms works according to somewhat different laws. In this world, effects can happen without any reason.
Once upon a time in the distant past, our entire universe was microscopic – like an atom. Since some effects in the microscopic world do not need causes, it is possible that there was no reason for the Big Bang to start at all!
It is also possible that there was no time at all before the Big Bang. Therefore, it probably makes no sense to ask what was “before”, since there was no very concept of “before”. That is, time itself was formed only at the time of the Big Bang.
The circuit of the universe
Some scientists suggest that our universe is the result of the death of another universe and its collapse – the so-called “Great Leap Forward”. The collapsing universe returns to a singularity before “jumping” back, triggering the Big Bang and starting an entirely new universe.
In this case, the force of gravity should not only stop the stretching of the Universe, but also return everything inside it to one point. Unfortunately, current observations show us that our universe will not follow this trend as it is stretching faster than ever before.
Or perhaps our universe is at the other end of a black hole called a white hole. White holes are the hypothetical “opposite” of a black hole, which ejects material into space instead of sucking it in.
Or maybe our universe arose from an even larger universe! The image of the cosmic microwave background shown earlier shows that the residual radiation is not the same everywhere, but has clumps and bumps concentrated in certain areas.
Some cosmologists – people who study how our universe came into being – suggest that our universe is one of many universes in a larger multiverse.
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