Jun 2, 2024 05:09 PM
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathemati...-20240531/
INTRO: About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded.
That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments, the universe went through a brief period of extraordinarily fast expansion called inflation before settling into a lower gear.
That brief period is thought to have been caused by a peculiar form of high-energy matter that throws gravity into reverse, “inflating” the fabric of the universe exponentially quickly and causing it to grow by a factor of a million billion billion in less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Inflation explains why the universe appears to be so smooth and homogeneous when astronomers examine it at large scales.
But if inflation is responsible for all that can be seen today, that raises the question: What, if anything, came before?
No experiment has yet been devised that can observe what happened before inflation. However, mathematicians can sketch out some possible scenarios. The strategy is to apply Einstein’s general theory of relativity — a theory that equates gravity with the curvature of space-time — as far back into time as it can go.
That’s the hope of three researchers: Ghazal Geshnizjani of the Perimeter Institute, Eric Ling of the University of Copenhagen, and Jerome Quintin of the University of Waterloo. The trio recently published a paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics in which, Ling said, “we mathematically showed that there might be a way to see beyond our universe.”
Robert Brandenberger, a physicist at McGill University who was not involved with the study, said the new paper “sets a new standard of rigor for the analysis” of the mathematics of the beginning of time. In some cases, what appears at first to be a singularity — a point in space-time where mathematical descriptions lose their meaning — may in fact be an illusion... (MORE - details, minimal ads)
INTRO: About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded.
That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s. The story has been refined over the decades, most notably in the 1980s, when many cosmologists came to believe that in its first moments, the universe went through a brief period of extraordinarily fast expansion called inflation before settling into a lower gear.
That brief period is thought to have been caused by a peculiar form of high-energy matter that throws gravity into reverse, “inflating” the fabric of the universe exponentially quickly and causing it to grow by a factor of a million billion billion in less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Inflation explains why the universe appears to be so smooth and homogeneous when astronomers examine it at large scales.
But if inflation is responsible for all that can be seen today, that raises the question: What, if anything, came before?
No experiment has yet been devised that can observe what happened before inflation. However, mathematicians can sketch out some possible scenarios. The strategy is to apply Einstein’s general theory of relativity — a theory that equates gravity with the curvature of space-time — as far back into time as it can go.
That’s the hope of three researchers: Ghazal Geshnizjani of the Perimeter Institute, Eric Ling of the University of Copenhagen, and Jerome Quintin of the University of Waterloo. The trio recently published a paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics in which, Ling said, “we mathematically showed that there might be a way to see beyond our universe.”
Robert Brandenberger, a physicist at McGill University who was not involved with the study, said the new paper “sets a new standard of rigor for the analysis” of the mathematics of the beginning of time. In some cases, what appears at first to be a singularity — a point in space-time where mathematical descriptions lose their meaning — may in fact be an illusion... (MORE - details, minimal ads)
