by Ray Burke

Created on: October 20, 2010

The past and future universe

October 2010 – the TV science programme ‘Horizon’, examined the theories of what came before the Big Bang by several prominent physicists. The notion that anything could come before the Big Bang has been dismissed by many who cannot fathom such a concept or who still abide by a God-made universe. But thinking of a time before the Big Bang is no longer a fringe idea.

According to some theories, the Big Bang may not even have happened at all and our universe may have been preceded by another one. One factor in theorising the non-Big Bang was that of cause and effect. We humans can see the effect of the Big Bang; an expanding universe through which cosmologists can peer back 10 to the minus 34 (superscripted) seconds to after the Big Bang. But what caused its formation 13.7 billion years ago? What came before it? And what would it look like? Horizon queried the theorists.

Nothingness into Something:

Professor Michio Kaku thinks that the nothingness from which the Big Bang arose, needs to be redefined. While there’s a state of absolutely nothing (no time, space, energy, etc) there is also the nothingness of the vacuum, which in reality is only the absence of matter. In Kaku’s version of the pre-Big Bang universe, a high-energy vacuum existed where the energy temporarily transformed into matter. One of these transformations became self-sustaining causing a chain-reaction, which led to the Big Bang. So rather than absolutely nothing producing the universe; there was just nothing, which became something.

Eternal Inflation:

At Stanford University, Professor Andre Linde thinks the Big Bang idea is flawed. The universe is relatively smooth and ordered materially, not something that could have emerged from the chaos of a Big Bang. He now thinks that not only did Inflation greatly expand the size of the universe just after the Big Bang, hence the universe’s smoothness, but that Inflation was the creation event. Further, Linde posits Inflation as an eternal process with countless other universes, which sit in a ‘heavy vacuum’ superstructure, inflating from each other, like bubbles in Swiss cheese. Above all, Inflation has seen many of its predictions about the universe emerge, which some of the other theories have not.

The Big Bounce:

It is well known that Classical Newtonian theory and Quantum Mechanics do not mix, but Dr. Param Singh has discovered a possible paradigm-shifting mathematical

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