June 6th, 2008
A time before the Big Bang?
At any conference there’s one talk that changes the way you think about something, or crystalizes thoughts that you’ve had anyway. In the last few months I’d been thinking carefully about the answer to the question ‘but what happened before the Big Bang’, and a talk by Cosmic Variance blogger Sean Carroll crystalized some of those thoughts. He was clear that he was on the edge of speculation at times, but you can read the short version of my thoughts at the BBC website.
I’ll write more about my thoughts here over the weekend, so watch this space.
Update : Woo! Number 1 most emailed article…
on June 6th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Though I have no background within the field of astronomy, the topic of what was before the Big Bang has always intrigued me. One question, which I came across when reading Carroll’s article “Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?” in Scientific American’s May edition, was one which I recalled reading your BBC article.
As mentioned in your article:
“… a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe’s parent …”
It is the biologist within me which is speaking now, and also wondering, that if universes are thought to “bubble off” from previous, parent ones, can then universes be thought of as undegoing some sort of “evolution” similar to that biological organisms? Of course, I do realise that the universe is neither biological nor an organism, but as even inorganic collections of matter are undergoing processes similar to that of evolution, I hope that my question is not seen as formulated out of the blue. Is this an idea which has been pursued by cosmologists?
I will be sure to watch this space over the weekend as the question, as aforementioned, intrigues me.
on June 6th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Congratulations Chris!
(No clever scientific thoughts to add at this time of night . . .)
on June 7th, 2008 at 6:01 am
if possible please give esplanation about “A TIME BEFORE BIGBANG WITH PICTURES”
on June 7th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Chris, thanks for covering my talk. Just to be clear, the connection between our ideas about using the multiverse to address the arrow-of-time problem and our recent paper about the power asymmetry in the CMB is a very tenuous one — so tenuous as to be almost non-existent! I was mostly trying to make the point that, although multiverse ideas are very new and underdeveloped, it is certainly imaginable that someday when we understand them better we will be able to make concrete predictions. The new CMB paper is interesting mostly as an investigation into conventional inflation, but there might be some connection to the pre-inflationary universe, which is certainly intriguing. But it’s all quite speculative at this point.
on June 8th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
[...] One of the people in the audience was Chris Lintott, who wrote up a description for the BBC. Admittedly, this is difficult stuff to get all straight the very first time, but I think his article gives the impression that there is a much more direct connection between my arrow-of-time work and our recent paper on the lopsided universe. In particular, there is no necessary connection between the existence of a supermode and the idea that our universe “bubbled off” from a pre-existing spacetime. (There might be a connection, but it is not a necessary one.) If you look through the paper, there’s nothing in there about entropy or the multiverse or any of that; we’re really motivated by trying to explain an interesting feature of the CMB data. Nevertheless, our proposed solution does hint at things that happened before the period of inflation that set up the conditions within our observable patch. These two pieces of research are not of a piece, but they both play a part in a larger story — attempting to understand the low entropy of the early universe suggests the need for something that came before, and it’s good to be reminded that we don’t yet know whether stuff that came before might have left some observable imprint on what we see around us today. Larger stories are what we’re all about. [...]
on June 9th, 2008 at 8:10 am
[...] You now don’t have to listen to my attempt to parse Sean Carroll’s talk, but can go and read his take on the research at Cosmic Variance. [...]
on July 18th, 2008 at 2:50 am
A mathematical why of the Big Bang
Outline
Let Ui be a set of locations of particles of the universe.
U1xU2x …… xUix ….. a set of infinite paths
(Cartesian product of sets of urelements).
this set is equal to the void set by the
negation of the axiom of choice.
So there is no more space containing the particles.
The particles collapse on themselves: Big Crunch.
Then Big Bang.
The Big Bang has taken place thus the negation of the axiom
of choice is likely to be considered as a good axiom.
Adib Ben Jebara.