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Article  The strongest evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang

#1
C C Offline
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...-big-bang/

KEY POINTS: For many decades, people conflated the hot Big Bang, describing the early Universe, with a singularity: that this "Big Bang" was the birth of space and time. However, in the early 1980s, a new theory called cosmic inflation came along, suggesting that before the hot Big Bang, the Universe behaved very differently, pushing any hypothetical singularity unobservably far back. Earlier this century, some very strong evidence arrived showing that there was a Universe before the Big Bang, demonstrating that the Big Bang wasn't truly the start of it all.

EXCERPT: . . . As you can clearly see, there can be no doubt that there truly are super-horizon fluctuations within the Universe, as the significance of this signal is overwhelming. The fact that we see super-horizon fluctuations, and that we see them not merely from reionization but as they are predicted to exist from inflation, is a slam dunk: the non-inflationary, singular Big Bang model does not match up with the Universe we observe. Instead, we learn that we can only extrapolate the Universe back to a certain cutoff point in the context of the hot Big Bang, and that prior to that, an inflationary state must have preceded the hot Big Bang.

We’d love to say more about the Universe than that, but unfortunately, those are the observable limits: fluctuations and imprints on larger scales leave no effect on the Universe that we can see. There are other tests of inflation that we can look for as well: a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of purely adiabatic fluctuations, a cutoff in the maximum temperature of the hot Big Bang, a slight departure from perfect flatness to the cosmological curvature and a primordial gravitational wave spectrum among them. However, the super-horizon fluctuation test is an easy one to perform and one that’s completely robust.

All on its own, it’s enough to tell us that the Universe didn’t start with the hot Big Bang, but rather that an inflationary state preceded it and set it up. Although it’s generally not talked about in such terms, this discovery, all by itself, is easily a Nobel-worthy achievement... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Syne Offline
Did people really conflate the two, or have those using the term "hot Big Bang" just been equivocating?
Considering the Big Bang is the theoretical beginning of our universe, a state of our universe, hot or not, some time after the beginning doesn't really qualify.

So all this "universe before the Big Bang," is just equivocating, when they really mean "universe before the hot Big Bang. That's trivial, not a headline.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
Quote: All on its own, it’s enough to tell us that the Universe didn’t start with the hot Big Bang, but rather that an inflationary state preceded it and set it up

Sounds like my old cathode ray tube TV when I turned it on. I could watch the picture spread across the screen, from a little dot to a full picture.
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