What came before the bigbang.?

Answer 1

What came before the Big Bang?

It seems fairly likely that there was a Big Bang. The obvious question that could be asked to challenge or define the boundaries between physics and metaphysics is: what came before the Big Bang?
Physicists define the boundaries of physics by trying to describe them theoretically and then testing that description against observation. Our observed expanding Universe is very well described by flat space, with critical density supplied mainly by dark matter and a cosmological constant, that should expand forever.
If we follow this model backwards in time to when the Universe was very hot and dense, and dominated by radiation, then we have to understand the particle physics that happens at such high densities of energy. The experimental understanding of particle physics starts to poop out after the energy scale of electroweak unification, and theoretical physicists have to reach for models of particle physics beyond the Standard Model, to Grand Unified Theories, supersymmetry, string theory and quantum cosmology.
This exploration is guided by three outstanding problems with the Big Bang cosmological model:
1. The flatness problem
2. The horizon problem
3. The magnetic monopole problem
Flatness problem

The Universe as observed today seems to enough energy density in the form of matter and cosmological constant to provide critical density and hence zero spatial curvature. The Einstein equation predicts that any deviation from flatness in an expanding Universe filled with matter or radiation only gets bigger as the Universe expands. So any tiny deviation from flatness at a much earlier time would have grown very large by now. If the deviation from flatness is very small now, it must have been immeasurably small at the start of the part of Big Bang we understand.
So why did the Big Bang start off with the deviations from flat spatial geometry being immeasurably small? This is called the flatness problem of Big Bang cosmology.
Whatever physics preceded the Big Bang left the Universe in this state. So the physics description of whatever happened before the Big Bang has to address the flatness problem.
Horizon problem

The cosmic microwave background is the cooled remains of the radiation density from the radiation-dominated phase of the Big Bang. Observations of the cosmic microwave background show that it is amazingly smooth in all directions, in other words, it is highly isotropic thermal radiation. The temperature of this thermal radiation is 2.73° Kelvin. The variations observed in this temperature across the night sky are very tiny.
Radiation can only be so uniform if the photons have been mixed around a lot, or thermalized, through particle collisions. However, this presents a problem for the Big Bang model. Particle collisions cannot move information faster than the speed of light. But in the expanding Universe that we appear to live in, photons moving at the speed of light cannot get from one side of the Universe to the other in time to account for this observed isotropy in the thermal radiation. The horizon size represents the distance a photon can travel as the Universe expands.
The horizon size of our Universe today is too small for the isotropy in the cosmic microwave background to have evolved naturally by thermalization. So that's the horizon problem.
Magnetic monopole problem

Normally, as we observe on Earth, magnets only come with two poles, North and South. If one cuts a magnet in half, the result will not be one magnet with only a North pole and one magnet with only a South pole. The result will be two magnets, each of which has its own North and South poles. A magnet cut in half still has two poles
A magnetic monopole would be a magnet with only one pole. But magnetic monopoles have never been seen? Why not?
This is different from electric charge, where we can separate an arrangement of positive and negative electric charges so that only positive charge is in one collection and only negative charge is in another.
Particle theories like Grand Unified Theories and superstring theory predict magnetic monopoles should exist, and relativity tells us that the Big Bang should have produced a lot of them, enough to make one hundred billion times the observed energy density of our Universe.
But so far, physicists have been unable to find even one.
So that's a third motivation to go beyond the Big Bang model to look for an explanation of what could have happened when the Universe was very hot and very small.

Inflationary universe?

Matter and radiation are gravitationally attractive, so in a maximally symmetric spacetime filled with matter, the gravitational force will inevitably cause any lumpiness in the matter to grow and condense. That's how hydrogen gas turned into galaxies and stars. But vacuum energy comes with a high vacuum pressure, and that high vacuum pressure resists gravitational collapse as a kind of repulsive gravitational force. The pressure of the vacuum energy flattens out the lumpiness, and makes space get flatter, not lumpier, as it expands.
So one possible solution to the flatness problem would be if our Universe went through a phase where the only energy density present was a uniform vacuum energy. If this phase occurred before the radiation-dominated era, then the Universe could evolve to be extraordinarily flat when the radiation-dominated era began, so extraordinarily flat that the lumpy evolution of the radiation- and matter-dominated periods would be consistent with the high degree of remaining flatness that is observed today.
This type of solution to the flatness problem was proposed in the 1980s by cosmologist Alan Guth. The model is called the Inflationary Universe. In the Inflation model, our Universe starts out as a rapidly expanding bubble of pure vacuum energy, with no matter or radiation. After a period of rapid expansion, or inflation, and rapid cooling, the potential energy in the vacuum is converted through particle physics processes into the kinetic energy of matter and radiation. The Universe heats up again and we get the standard Big Bang.
So an inflationary phase before the Big Bang could explain how the Big Bang started with such extraordinary spatial flatness that it is still so close to being flat today.A magnet cut in half still has two poles
Inflationary models also solve the horizon problem. The vacuum pressure accelerates the expansion of space in time so that a photon can traverse much more of space than it could in a spacetime filled with matter. To put it another way, the attractive force of matter on light in some sense slows the light down by slowing down the expansion of space itself. In an inflationary phase, the expansion of space is accelerated by vacuum pressure from the cosmological constant, and light gets farther faster because space is expanding faster.
If there were an inflationary phase of our Universe before the radiation-dominated era of the Big Bang, then by the end of the inflationary period, light could have crossed the whole Universe. And so the isotropy of the radiation from the Big Bang would no longer be inconsistent with the finiteness of the speed of light.
The inflationary model also solves the magnetic monopole problem, because in the particle physics that underlies the inflationary idea, there would only be one magnetic monopole per vacuum energy bubble. That means only one magnetic monopole per Universe.
That's why the inflationary universe theory is still the favored pre-Big Bang cosmology among cosmologists.
But how does Inflation work?

The vacuum energy that drives the rapid expansion in an inflationary cosmology comes from a scalar field that is part of the spontaneous symmetry breaking dynamics of some unified theory particle theory, say, a Grand Unified Theory or string theory.
This field is sometimes called the inflaton. The average value of the inflaton at temperature T is the value at the minimum of its potential energy at that temperature. The location of this minimum changes with temperature, as is shown in the animation to the right.
For temperatures T above some critical temperature Tcrit, the minimum of the potential is at zero. But as the temperature cools, the potential changes and a second minimum develops in the potential at a nonzero value. This signals something called a phase transition, like when steam cools and condenses into water. For water the critical temperature Tcrit where this phase transition happens is 100°C, or 373°K.
The two minima in the potential represent the two possible phases of the inflaton field, and of the Universe, at the critical temperature. One phase has the minimum of the field f=0, and the other phase represents the vacuum energy if the ground state has f=f0.
According to the inflationary model, at the critical temperature, spacetime starts to under go this phase transition from one minimum to the other. But it doesn't do it smoothly, it stays in the old "false" vacuum too long. This is called supercooling. This region of false vacuum expands exponentially fast, and the vacuum energy of this false vacuum is the cosmological constant for the expansion. It is this process that is called Inflation and solves the flatness, horizon and monopole problems.
This region of false vacuum expands until bubbles of the new broken symmetry phase with f=f0 form and collide, and eventually end the inflationary phase. The potential energy of the vacuum is converted through to kinetic energy of matter and radiation, and the Universe expands according to the Big Bang model already outlined.
A testable prediction?

It's always good to have testable predictions from a theory of physics, and the inflation theory has a distinct prediction about the density variations in the cosmic microwave background. A bubble of inflation consists of accelerating vacuum. In this accelerating vacuum, a scalar field will have very small thermal fluctuations that are nearly the same at every scale, and the fluctuations will be have a Gaussian distribution. This prediction fits current observations and will be tested with greater precision by future measurements of the cosmic microwave background.
So are all the problems solved?

Despite the prediction above, inflation as described above is far from an ideal theory. It's too hard to stop the inflationary phase, and the monopole problem has other ways of resurfacing in the physics. Many of the assumptions that go into the model, such as an initial high temperature phase and a single inflating bubble have been questioned and alternative models have been developed.
Today's inflation models have evolved beyond the original assumption of a single inflation event giving birth to a single Universe, and feature scenarios where universes nucleate and inflate out of other universes in the process called eternal inflation.
There is also another attempt to solve the problems of Big Bang cosmology using a scalar field that never goes through an inflationary period at all, but evolves so slowly so that we observe it as being constant during our own era. This model is called quintessence, after the ancient spiritual belief in the Quinta Essentia, the spiritual matter from which the four forms of physical matter are made.
So where does string theory fit in all of this? That's the next topic.

Answer 2

From the movement in the universe, it appears that the universe had a beginning. Call it the big bang if you want.

Obviously, there were some kind of events that led up to the big bang. The real question is, how can something be created from nothing. Those who say that anything before the big bang was before time and is meaningless is giving up because the question is too hard.

Time is just a yardstick that was created by man to keep track of and try to organize things. Of course what we call time passed before the big bang. They call light time but the speed of light is just a unit of measurement and not even a very good one. If we can observe light being bent by objects with a large amount of gravity, it stands to reason that anything with gravity, however imperceptively bends light. Any time you add a bend to a line, the line has to be longer between the same two points. So we have light getting bent all over the universe and we have no idea how far away something is or how long it actually took for the light to get here.

To say it always existed is contrary to all that we know, so far, and another cop out.

While they say things like this, some scientists are doing vacuum experiments trying to figure out how to create something from nothing. They have theorized that the vacuum ( the nothing that existed before there was something) had strings in it, was polarized, had variations in pressure, and had waves. Well there's no strings and nothing to vibrate the strings, nothing to polarize, no pressure variations, and nothing to create waves, in nothing.

So, they don't like to talk about the vacuum. However, if you introduce matter to a vacuum, you get movement, you get gravity, you get light, and you get magnetism - all of the ingrediants that made the universe and exist in it now. Plus, the vacuum explains the movement in the universe now.

A vacuum, by the way, behaves exactly like the black holes that they theorize are constructed of mass so dense that their gravity won't allow anything to escape.

So, the question remains. What created something from nothing?

Answer 3

A new theory for the origin of the Universe is intriguing astronomers with the idea that a "Big Splat" preceded the Big Bang.

It proposes that there may be an unseen parallel universe to ours.

The idea, which is still at the development stage, may provide hints about what happened before our Universe exploded into existence some 15 billion years ago.

The theory has been outlined in the past few days at the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Space Telescope Science Institute in the US.

Paul Steinhardt and colleagues at Princeton University propose the so-called "ekpyrotic model". It explains important details about the nature of our Universe such as why the cosmos is expanding the way it is.

M-theory

For the uninitiated, the ideas are difficult to grasp. At their heart is string theory, the idea that the fundamental building blocks of space and time are tiny vibrating strings. String theory has excited theorists in the past few years although it has remained very much untested.

Steinhardt's ideas about the origin of the Universe are based on an extension of string theory called M-theory.

M-theory does not do away with the Big Bang. The evidence that everything emerged from a 'fireball' with a temperature of 10 billion degrees, expanding on a timescale of one second, is now very compelling and uncontroversial.

Instead, M-theory looks at events before the Big Bang, proposing that the Universe has 11 dimensions, six of them rolled up into microscopic filaments that can, for all intents, be ignored.

Professor Sir Martin Rees of Cambridge University told BBC News Online: "Steinhardt and his colleagues offer a fascinating idea, invoking the idea of more than one universe embedded in higher-dimensional space."

The action of the Universe takes place in five-dimensional space. Before the Big Bang occurred the Universe consisted of two perfectly flat four-dimensional surfaces.

One of these sheets is our Universe; the other, a "hidden" parallel universe.

According to the Princeton researchers, random fluctuations in this unseen companion universe caused it to distort and reach towards our Universe.

The floater "splatted" into our Universe and the energy of the collision was transformed into the matter and energy of our Universe in a Big Bang.

According to Professor Sir Martin Rees: "All these ideas about the ultra-early universe highlight the link between cosmos and micro-world - the ideas won't be firmed up until we have a proper understanding of space and time, the 'bedrock' of the physical world."

Answer 4

The simple answer is that we really don't know:

It seems to me that there are three possibilities:

1. Time began at the big bang. If this is the case your question is meaningless. Its like asking what is north of the north pole.

2. Time did not begin at the big bang event and something existed before the big bang event. This leads to much speculation with little known for sure.

3. Time does not really exist as we perceive it and what we perceive as time is derived from something more fundamental. This may lead to your question being meaningless as well. This idea comes from the observation that if nothing were to change we could not say that times passes. Change is primary, time, if it exists at all, is something we deduce from it. If this is true many of our preconceptions about time are completely wrong.

Answer 5

Nothing. The Big Bang not only created everything in existance but also created time, to have a 'before' we need time to exist, if time does not exist then we cannot have a before.

A contracted universe. Another theory says that an expanding universe (as we supposedly have now) eventually starts to fall in on itself until it crunches into a singularity which then creates another Big Bang throwing everything out once more,in, out, in, out, in, out etc etc, though no shaking about. Sort of like a breathing universe.

Answer 6

A large mass of energy contained within a line of planck time, experiencing strong quantum effects.


And yes there was a big bang. Don't listen to some of these people...do some research for Gods sake, like WMAP, Nasa ect.

Why do people deny the truth?

Answer 7

God Created everything, no matter what theory you believe in, and remember, "theories are not Facts", as most people seem to mistake. I am a Born-Again-Christian and I used to be an amateur astronomer, before I went into the Armed Forces.

When you put your Faith in Jesus Christ and sincerely turn your life over to Him, the Holy Spirit will give you the answers to everything in life. As well as a home in Heaven when everything will be revealed to us. Nothing came from nothing, nothing ever did, everything made had to have a Maker, so wether you believe in the big bang theory or evolution, or whatever, remember that they are only theories, and a long way from being facts.

The greatest scientific minds in the world cannot explain "why a Black cow, that eats Green grass, produces White milk, that makes Yellow butter". God is all powerful and we are mere mortals, our brains cannot possible compare to God. He has, and always will, exist. That might be hard for people to imagine but put your faith in Christ and give Him a chance, the Holy Spirit will give you guidance as to what is right and what is wrong.

I can remember looking through my first telescope, the whole universe was opened up to me, and I knew and still do, that this did not happen by mere chance. God is the answer to all our needs.

Answer 8

It doesn't matter what we think. It matters what the physics shows. The Big Bang cut off any history of what could be before it, if "before" makes any sense without matter/space/time. A current idea being worked on by some cosmologists is that our universe exists within a multiverse of many other universes -- perhaps an infinite number of them. Each universe would begin with its own big bang. It used to be that science couldn't answer the question about the origin of the Big Bang, but that didn't mean we should make up an answer and say that it was the cause. Within the last few decades science has discovered some good answers. There are many well-respected physicists, such as Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sean M. Carroll, Victor Stenger, Michio Kaku, Alan Guth, Alex Vilenkin, Robert A.J. Matthews, and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who have created scientific models where the Big Bang and thus the entire universe could arise from nothing but a quantum vacuum fluctuation -- via natural processes. In relativity, gravity is negative energy and matter is positive energy. Because the two seem to be equal in absolute total value, our observable universe appears balanced to the sum of zero. Our universe could thus have come into existence without violating conservation of mass and energy — with the matter of the universe condensing out of the positive energy as the universe cooled, and gravity created from the negative energy. When energy condenses into matter, equal parts of matter and antimatter are created — which annihilate each other to form energy. However there is a slight imbalance to the process, which results in matter dominating over antimatter. I know that this doesn't make sense in our Newtonian experience, but it does in the realm of quantum mechanics and relativity. As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman wrote, "The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is — absurd." "To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." — Isaac Asimov "As far as I can see, such a theory [of the primeval atom] remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. It leaves the materialist free to deny any transcendental Being… For the believer, it removes any attempt at familiarity with God." — Georges Lemaître, Catholic priest who first proposed what became the Big Bang Theory For more, watch the video at the 1st link - "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss. -

Answer 9

a serious response now

there is a something called string theory which takes a long time to explain basically they are paraell dimensions in space the theory is that these dimensions interconnect and that what caused the big bang. Have a look on the internet about string theory.

Answer 10

BigBang Music..
Glenn Millerstone
Rocky Asteroid.. all the great classics

Answer 11

It seems fairly likely that there was a Big Bang. The obvious question that could be asked to challenge or define the boundaries between physics and metaphysics is: what came before the Big Bang?
Physicists define the boundaries of physics by trying to describe them theoretically and then testing that description against observation. Our observed expanding Universe is very well described by flat space, with critical density supplied mainly by dark matter and a cosmological constant, that should expand forever.
If we follow this model backwards in time to when the Universe was very hot and dense, and dominated by radiation, then we have to understand the particle physics that happens at such high densities of energy. The experimental understanding of particle physics starts to poop out after the energy scale of electroweak unification, and theoretical physicists have to reach for models of particle physics beyond the Standard Model, to Grand Unified Theories, supersymmetry, string theory and quantum cosmology.
This exploration is guided by three outstanding problems with the Big Bang cosmological model:
1. The flatness problem
2. The horizon problem
3. The magnetic monopole problem


Flatness problem
The Universe as observed today seems to enough energy density in the form of matter and cosmological constant to provide critical density and hence zero spatial curvature. The Einstein equation predicts that any deviation from flatness in an expanding Universe filled with matter or radiation only gets bigger as the Universe expands. So any tiny deviation from flatness at a much earlier time would have grown very large by now. If the deviation from flatness is very small now, it must have been immeasurably small at the start of the part of Big Bang we understand.
So why did the Big Bang start off with the deviations from flat spatial geometry being immeasurably small? This is called the flatness problem of Big Bang cosmology.
Whatever physics preceded the Big Bang left the Universe in this state. So the physics description of whatever happened before the Big Bang has to address the flatness problem.

Horizon problem
The cosmic microwave background is the cooled remains of the radiation density from the radiation-dominated phase of the Big Bang. Observations of the cosmic microwave background show that it is amazingly smooth in all directions, in other words, it is highly isotropic thermal radiation. The temperature of this thermal radiation is 2.73° Kelvin. The variations observed in this temperature across the night sky are very tiny.
Radiation can only be so uniform if the photons have been mixed around a lot, or thermalized, through particle collisions. However, this presents a problem for the Big Bang model. Particle collisions cannot move information faster than the speed of light. But in the expanding Universe that we appear to live in, photons moving at the speed of light cannot get from one side of the Universe to the other in time to account for this observed isotropy in the thermal radiation. The horizon size represents the distance a photon can travel as the Universe expands.
The horizon size of our Universe today is too small for the isotropy in the cosmic microwave background to have evolved naturally by thermalization. So that's the horizon problem.

Magnetic monopole problem
Normally, as we observe on Earth, magnets only come with two poles, North and South. If one cuts a magnet in half, the result will not be one magnet with only a North pole and one magnet with only a South pole. The result will be two magnets, each of which has its own North and South poles.
A magnetic monopole would be a magnet with only one pole. But magnetic monopoles have never been seen? Why not?
This is different from electric charge, where we can separate an arrangement of positive and negative electric charges so that only positive charge is in one collection and only negative charge is in another.
Particle theories like Grand Unified Theories and superstring theory predict magnetic monopoles should exist, and relativity tells us that the Big Bang should have produced a lot of them, enough to make one hundred billion times the observed energy density of our Universe.
But so far, physicists have been unable to find even one.
So that's a third motivation to go beyond the Big Bang model to look for an explanation of what could have happened when the Universe was very hot and very small.