Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe
by Brian Clegg
—Reviewed by Jodie Liu
From hypothetical dark energy to spacetime-contorting black holes, the universe confounds astrophysicists trying to divine its origins. However widely accepted Big Bang theory may be — that the universe sprung into being 14 billion years ago — Brian Clegg shows in his Before the Big Bang that it is by no means the only credible explanation for the universe’s birth. Sifting through folkloric myths and science-fiction fantasies, Clegg explores the numerous creation theories that physicists and philosophers alike have put forth — and makes some daring conjectures of his own.
Despite the title, Clegg has his doubts about the Big Bang theory, claiming that it has the feel of being “held together with a band-aid.” As Clegg shows, the creators of the Big Bang theory spanned countries and generations, from Belgian priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre — who in 1927 initially proposed the idea of the universe expanding from an infinitesimally small speck of matter — to English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “Big Bang” in 1949. Since then, several scientists have pitched in — whenever advancements in technology yielded data that conflicted with components of the existing theory, astrophysicists would scramble to revise accordingly. One spot that has yet to be fully reconciled is the issue of expansion. If the universe amassed its current size from a primeval super atom, then “the current rate of expansion,” Clegg notes, “would leave space much more wrinkled and bumpy than is actually the case.”
But according to Clegg, the greatest problem with the Big Bang theory isn’t with the particulars, but rather with the fundamental (and universal, if you will) element of time. After cautioning that thinking about time “tends to twist the mind into pretzel form,” Clegg asks a perplexing question that resonates in the title: what came before the Big Bang? Here, supporters of the Big Bang theory come up empty-handed, and Clegg hints that a non-astrophysicist may know best. In his Confessions, St. Augustine proposed that before creation, there was no time as we know it, “no past and no future” but simply “always the present.”
Scientists, however, are not easily appeased by this idea of timelessness, and have devised theories that seek to explain both the origin of the universe and what came before. Loop quantum gravity, a relatively recent such all-encompassing hypotheses, views the universe as a mass of “springy little connections” that can contract and then bounce out again, implying that the beginning the universe was not a singular event but the result of many contractions and expansions. String theory, perhaps the most complex and well-known of the Big Bang alternatives, attempts to redefine the entire universe. To put it very simply, string theory argues that the universe is comprised of several interwoven dimensions — not three, but as many as ten or eleven — and this multiplicity raises a number of mind-boggling complications. So far, string theory offers no resolute answer for what came before the Big Bang, but supporters believe that the explanation could be uncovered once string theory is fully elucidated.
And since these theories can be quite complex to grasp, Clegg uses movies to translate. He likens Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray must relive the same day, to theories that propose multiple universes cycling through “endless collapses into a Big Crunch followed by endless rebirths in new Big Bangs.” Clegg cites loop quantum gravity as one such Groundhog universe. He also uses elements of The Matrix to suggest that perhaps “the world as we know it is a vast computer program, run on machines built by an intelligence we know nothing about in a universe that could like any of the ones we speculate about, or one that is totally strange and alien.” In that case, our human theories—no matter how ingenious or elegant — may never decode the mystery.
It is not a theory that Clegg seriously believes himself, but it does bring up a valid point. Just as certain mathematical enigmas are beyond solution, Clegg concedes that the origin of the universe may perpetually remain an impossible scientific quandary.
Excerpt: “Cosmology suffers in comparison to most science because it is not experimental and there is no way to ever make it experimental. You can’t do an experiment in controlled conditions on the universe as a whole and see what the outcome is. You have, instead, to make observations, often of something so far away in space and time that you can only ever study it highly indirectly, and then attempt to draw inferences. There is inevitably a fair amount of guesswork involved.
“Rightly or wrongly, scientists add confusion to this picture by referring to the components of today’s popular cosmological theories as if they were absolute truths. We can never truly prove something. I can’t prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning; I can only say it is highly probable based on past evidence. The same goes for any scientific theory from Newton’s laws of motion to Boyle’s gas law. I can demonstrate that it matches all observations to date, but I can’t prove it to be absolutely correct.”
Further Reading: From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
*Photo courtesy pshutterbug.
*Note, this book review has been edited since posting. An earlier draft stated incorrectly that St. Augustine was a Greek philosopher. Thank you to those who pointed out the error.
[...] BEFORE THE Big Bang. [...]
I was taught that time is essentially a side effect of entropy. Lacking entropic changes, the pre-Bang universe would have no discernible time.
Nice book review, but St. Augustine was not a Greek philosopher. He lived about 700 years after Plato, and while influenced by Plato and other Greek philosophers, is best known as a Christian theologian and philosopher. His writings, especially Confessions, have had a profound influence on Christianity in the Western world.
Fred Hoyle coined the term ‘big bang’ in order to mock the theory, not to support it. He was uncomfortable with the universe so resembling the book of Genesis, chapter 1. He does not seem to be alone. When you’re mining folklore and science fiction in order to attack the big bang instead of relying on better experiments, better science, one really should ask why. At least on the surface it seems as if any alternative will do so long as that scientific support for christianity called the big bang goes away.
“the world as we know it is a vast computer program, run on machines built by an intelligence we know nothing about in a universe that could like any of the ones we speculate about, or one that is totally strange and alien.”
Well at least this is true of the earth. And the answer is “42″.
Many of the things scientists are theorizing or “discovering” were said thousands of year ago by Hindus, Buddhists and ancient Western philosophers. Roughly before Kant, scientists and philosophers were more or less the same: pursuing knwoledge of the truth through the use of reason and the scientific method. Kant, in the mid-18th Century, showed that the human mind can never know what he called “the thing in itself,” what we might refer to as “objective reality,” because everything we perceive or “know” is done so unavoidably through the filters and limits of the structure of the human mind. Mystics have an expanded definition of “the human mind,” but after Kant, who also reminmded everyone of the lessons of Plato, Aristotle, Nargarjuna and other profound philosophers of old, that we could not prove causation, and that we could not “know” the “thing in itself.” So “scientists” branched off from philosophy and dedicated themselves to observing phenomena, patterns in their behavior and making predictions (there is a very high probability the sun will rise tomorrow.) But they have forgotten that with the limited tools they are using, they cannot by definition ever know things that are beyond space, time and the structure of the rational mind, by using simply the rational mind.
Some such scientists don’t let that stop them, so we have the likes of Richard Dawkins trying to make grand metaphysical pronouncements. Others, like the quantum physicists referred to in the article above, acknowledge they may forever be beyond their depth. But the really great quantum physicists mostly became, or have become, mystics themselves, because they know they must move beyond the narrow faculties of mind used in math and science to understand the biggest questions.
You’ll never know what came before since there was (will be?) no before.
God, perhaps.
@Jeff Doolittle
Dude, the answer is not 42. It is 37. Always has been, always will be, forever and ever amen.
One possibility is, if you have a huge amount of empty space, i.e. nothing, an important property of that nothing is, it will undergo an instability producing a big bang. The resulting creation of matter and energy stabilizes the space against further instability, so just one big bang per universe. Like Euler buckling, the empty space develops an internal stress (analog) integrated over vast distances that grows large enough to rupture space creating a big bang. Many physicists have noted that the fundamental units of permittivity and permeability combine to form units of energy per unit volume of space. Has any one ever integrated this up to see what size sphere stores enough energy to match the big bang?
Before the ‘big bang’…or the creation of physical matter in the universe…there was ‘war in heaven’…and Lucifer and his angels fought against Michael the archangel and the heavenly host…and prevailed not…and Lucifer and 1/3 of the host were cast out of heaven…and the Almighty had to create a physical universe for them to exist in…this are science and religion reconciled…
Jeff:
Just remember to bring your towel.
I was thinking of a slightly different story.
There are only two possibilities: either the universe is infinite or it is not. If the universe is infinite, then nothing that we deduce from observations of our tiny corner can apply in general. If, on the other hand, the universe is finite, then we ought to be able to detect it.
The biggest problem of the big bang theory is that it presumes a drastic discontinuity in the laws of physics, purportedly to avoid contradicting the laws of physics.
I am willing to listen to sensible arguments, but I am not willing to listen to bloviation.
what came before the Big Bang?
What lies north of the North Pole?
The basic error in each of these questions is the same.
if you could get to the edge of the universe, and then go beyond it, what is beyond the universe?
The basic point of the Big Bang theory — that the universe has expanded from a denser, hot state — is not seriously disputed. There is simply no other workable explanation for cosmic microwave background radiation (and no, radiation from stars or dust clouds or iron whiskers in a steady state universe just doesn’t work.)
“what came before the Big Bang?
What lies north of the North Pole?
The basic error in each of these questions is the same.”
Yes, and if God is truly omnipotent, can He create a rock so big that even He can’t pick it up?
Clever-sounding formulations that explain nothing are not helpful.
The reason why there is nothing north of the north pole is that ‘north’ is a 2-dimensional concept imposed, for convenience, on a 3-dimensional world. If there was really nothing before the Big Bang for the same reason that there is nothing north of the north pole, you are saying that, for convenience, we are trying to explain the universe we see using in our normal 4 dimensions, when the universe actually exists in more than 4 dimensions. But, per the Big Bang theory, the 4-dimensional universe we see not only began with the Big Bang, but can be wholly described in 4-dimensional terms. See the problem? Our 4-dimensional universe had a date/time specific beginning. Why? When? What? How? Dare I ask…Who?
“One possibility is, if you have a huge amount of empty space, i.e. nothing, an important property of that nothing is, it will undergo an instability producing a big bang.”
How can “nothing” (non-being) have any properties? Don’t properties require “something” for them to be a property of?