Nature of the First Cause: The Discovery of What Triggered the Big Bang

Peering Back to the Big Bang ].

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However, inflation is not the only idea out there that tries to explain the universe's structure. Theorists have come up with another one, called the cyclic model, which is based on an earlier concept called the ekpyrotic universe. This idea holds that our universe didn't emerge from a single point, or anything like it. Rather, it "bounced" into expansion — at a much more sedate pace than the inflation theory predicts — from a pre-existing universe that had been contracting. If this theory is correct, our universe has likely undergone an endless succession of "bangs" and "crunches.

The cyclic model posits that our universe consists of 11 dimensions, only four of which we can observe three of space and one of time. Our four-dimensional part of the universe is called a brane short for membrane.

There could be other branes lurking out there in dimensional space, the idea goes. A collision between two branes could have jolted the universe from contraction to expansion, spurring the Big Bang we see evidence of today. Soon, scientists may know for sure which theory — inflation or the cyclic model — is a better representation of reality. For example, inflation likely would produce much stronger gravitational waves than an ekpyrotic "bounce," Filippenko said.

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So researchers are looking for any signs of these theoretical distortions of space time, which have yet to be observed. The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which launched in , may find the elusive gravitational waves. It may also gather other evidence that could tip the scales either way, Ovrut said. Cosmologists suspect that the four forces that rule the universe — gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces — were unified into a single force at the universe's birth, squashed together because of the extreme temperatures and densities involved. But things changed as the universe expanded and cooled.

Around the time of inflation, the strong force likely separated out. And by about 10 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang , the electromagnetic and weak forces became distinct, too. Just after inflation, the universe was likely filled with a hot, dense plasma. But by around 1 microsecond 10 to the minus 6 seconds or so, it had cooled enough to allow the first protons and neutrons to form, researchers think.

In the first three minutes after the Big Bang, these protons and neutrons began fusing together, forming deuterium also known as heavy hydrogen. Deuterium atoms then joined up with each other, forming helium These newly created atoms were all positively charged, as the universe was still too hot to favor the capture of electrons.

But that changed about , years after the Big Bang. In an epoch known as recombination, hydrogen and helium ions began snagging electrons, forming electrically neutral atoms. Light scatters significantly off free electrons and protons, but much less so off neutral atoms. So photons were now much more free to cruise through the universe.

Recombination dramatically changed the look of the universe; it had been an opaque fog, and now it became transparent. The cosmic microwave background radiation we observe today dates from this era.

Fog of Early Universe Seen ]. But still, the universe was pretty dark for a long time after recombination, only truly lighting up when the first stars began shining about million years after the Big Bang. The universe today is different from how it was yesterday , and it will be different tomorrow. And it's not just on local scales; the whole shindig changes character one day to the next. And if you notice that, every day, the universe is getting bigger, you can make a tremendous leap of logic to come to the conclusion that, long ago, the universe was … smaller?

Like any good scientist, as soon as you cook up this kind of ridiculous, preposterous concept, you start thinking through what the consequences would be and how you might test it — I know, radical notions. The story of the past ish billion years is a story of density. The universe is made of lots of kinds of stuff: All this stuff behaves differently at different densities, so when the universe was smaller, one kind of thing might dominate over another, and the physical behaviors of that thing would drive whatever was going on in the universe.

For example, nowadays, the universe is mostly dark energy whatever that is , and its behavior is ruling the universe — in this case, driving a period of accelerated expansion. But a few billion years ago, the universe was smaller, and all the matter was crammed more tightly together. And by virtue of its density, that matter was the ruler of the roost, overwhelming dark energy, which was just a background wimp rather than the powerhouse it is now. The dark energy takeover happened at about the same time our solar system was getting its stuff together, and at the time, the universe was about half its present size.

The birth of the Dark Energy Age might not seem that dramatic, but the further back you go in time — and the smaller you make the universe — the stranger it gets. Push back more than 13 billion years, when the universe was just one-thousandth of its current extent, and the matter that would one day make up entire galaxies is crammed together so tightly that atoms can't even form. It's so dense that every time a nucleus ropes in an electron, a careless high-energy photon slams into it, ripping the electron away.

This is a plasma, and at one time, the entire universe lived like this. But the universe is older and colder, and those high-energy gamma rays are now listless microwaves, creating a background permeating the cosmos — a cosmic microwave background, or CMB, if you will. The CMB is not only one of the major pieces of evidence for the Big Bang it's a baby picture of the universe…what else could you ask for? We may not be able to perceive the universe before the formation of the CMB, but the physics there leaves an imprint in that radiation field.

It's, well, kind of important. The further we push back in time, the stranger the universe gets — yes, even stranger than a plasma. Push back further, and stable nuclei can't form. Go even further back, and protons and neutrons can't stand the pressure and degenerate into their components: Push back even further and, well, it gets complicated.

The Big Bang theory can be summarized thusly: At one time, the entire universe — everything you know and love, everything on the Earth and in the heavens — was crushed into a trillion-Kelvin ball about the size of a peach. Really, the fruit doesn't matter here, OK? That statement sounds absolutely ridiculous, and if you said it a few hundred years ago… Well, I hope you like barbecues, because you're about to be burned at the stake.

We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we. First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning. Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble who discovered this phenomenon in This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.

Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery. Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations…. You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.

What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that. Gentry claims that the standard Big Bang model is founded upon a faulty paradigm the Friedmann-lemaitre expanding-spacetime paradigm which he claims is inconsistent with the empirical data.