This week the BBC showed a program in their long running “Horizon” series about the question “What came before the Big Bang?” Here is the gist of the message: A few years back cosmologists accepted that time did not exist before the big bang, so the question did not make sense. The universe along with time itself just started to exist and has been evolving nicely ever since. But now cosmologists are forming all kinds of theories that do put something before the big bang to explain how and why it happened.
So here is a list of the scientists that featured and the theory they adhere to:
- Andrei Linde: Multiverse inspired eternal inflation
- Param Singh: Big Bounce due to repulsive gravity at small distances
- Lee Smolin: Black Holes spawning baby universes
- Michio Kaku: Vacuum fluctuation from empty space
- Neil Turok: Colliding Branes
- Roger Penrose: The future is empty expanding space = a new big bang
- Laura Mersini Houghton: String cosmology
Each of these ideas has been around for some time and has been worked on by several people. The individuals mentioned here are not necessarily the ones who invented them. The Penrose theory is an exception in that it is a new idea that features in his next book.
In the program each of these scientists was interviewed while they tried to solve one of those wooden puzzles
The obvious conclusion to draw is that there are a lot of viable theories out there which cannot all be right. Each of the scientists seemed to have quite a strong belief in the theory they supported, but they would all acknowledge that more experimental input is needed to resolve the question. All of them are driven by a philosophical argument that temporal causality must hold absolute so some prior cause of the big bang is needed.
Along with all the theorising and philosophising, a couple of experiments were mentioned which they think might help test these different hypothesis. The first was LOFAR, a low-frequency radio telescope array that may detect background remnants from the big bang. The standard prediction is that it will be white noise, but anything else could be a clue that separates different theories, prepare your predictions in advance please. The second experiment was the more familiar LIGO and its space bound successors LISA. These may be able to detect a gravitational wave remnant from the big bang that could also have a distinctive signature. It is hoped that either of these experiments may see past the wall of last scattering from which the cosmic microwave background emerged to provide information from an earlier time.
Personally, I don’t accept the philosophical need for something before the big bang and I don’t particularly like any of the theories mentioned. I think it is more likely that there was no space or time prior to big bang singularity which itself is a high temperature and density phase with no fixed topology or geometry for spacetime. I am not alone in preferring theories that do not require time to extend before the big bang, but the program has selected those that do. Where was Hawking’s view for example?
I think that explaining the universe requires us to look at ontological causality rather than temporal causality and the big bang is just one feature of the universe, not the reason for its existence. Although the experiments mentioned and others may throw some light on the nature of the big bang, we first need a better understanding of quantum gravity. There is still scope for theoretical developments that may help even before the experiments bear fruit. Even if you favour the string theory/M-theory route to quantum gravity (as I do), a better understanding of their foundations is required before we can hope to answer these questions about cosmology.
Despite that, I don’t think it is wrong to explore a wide range of cosmological ideas of this kind provided they have some good mathematics behind them. It is time for science to start trying to answer such questions. They will have to be looked at from all angles, philosphical, mathematical and experimental if we want to get the right understanding.
For the record I thought this was a good Horizon program, some of their physics/cosmology episodes lately have been a bit empty and ill-conceived. The position was too one-sided, but well researched. I’m glad they did not make the mistake of mentioning the LHC as if it was likely to resolve these questions, but did mention some other experiments that stand a better chance.
If you missed the program or it is has not yet aired in your country, I dare say you will find it on the web using Google video search. I wont provide any links because I don’t know which if any are legal copies, or how long they will remain available, or whether the same links will work everywhere.
Posted by Philip Gibbs 
