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What Happened Before the Beginning?

from Through the Wormhole; How did the Universe begin? We've all heard of the Big Bang, but how do we really know that's the way it was? I mean, after all, nobody was around to see it happen. And if that question seems hard to answer, try this one, what happened before the Universe began? God then created the Heavens and the Earth. But if everything began at this moment, how was God around to create it? Could there ever have been a time before time? It's a question that has intrigued scientists and philosophers and the rest of us for more than 5,000 years. But in the 1920s, a scientific discovery shone some new light on the beginning of time and what might have come before, thanks to this man, Edwin Hubble. Atop Mount Wilson in Southern California, Hubble aimed a powerful, new weapon at the heavens, the mighty Hooker 101-inch telescope. Run this picture back in time, and all the math points to a single moment of an infinitely small, infinitely dense beginning to our Universe. Scientists have a name for this initial state, a singularity. Before this Big Bang, there is nowhere and no-when. There is literally nothing before this beginning. Run the clock forward from that singularity, and the starting gun is the Big Bang. Several billion years after the Big Bang, we get a planet like Earth. This mind-twisting story has become the new dogma, but however robust, the Big Bang is still just a theory. Princeton Professor of physics Dr. David Spergel has spent much of his career trying to understand if and how this cataclysmic event happened. People sometimes call him "Mr. Universe." For Spergel, the Big Bang is still the most complete and scientifically sound model of the early Universe. A picture of the beginning of time and space was starting to emerge. The first good estimate of when the Big Bang happened, between 12 and 14 billion years ago. It's working its way through the liftoff. 2001 with the launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, scientists were attempting to see as far back as they could, to the beginning of our world. The WMAP delivers on its promise, a crystal-clear baby picture of the Universe just 380,000 years after its birth. We can take the picture and go further back in time and learn about the Universe's beginnings, learn about where the baby came from, equivalently what happened in the first moments of the Big Bang. The details of our birth are actually imprinted in this picture. But what happened between that moment of singularity and the AP image 380,000 years later? For Dr. Alan Guth, a physicist from M.I.T., this missing moment in our Universe's timeline was the key to everything that came before and after the Big Bang. The mathematical equations just don't make sense anymore. The beginning of time is about to get a whole lot stranger. 40 years after two radio astronomers first heard a faint whisper from our own cosmic birth, David Spergel now has his baby picture of the Universe. For Dr. Alan Guth, what happened during this early moment in time was an intriguing mystery that had to be solved. Figuring this out became his life's work. There had been in cosmology a serious problem in understanding the uniformity of the Universe. Act one. A singularity pops into existence out of nowhere and no-when, containing in one single dot all the energy that will ever be in our Universe. Act two. Inflation suddenly takes hold, an unimaginably rapid expansion of space smoothly spreading out that energy, bringing order to the Universe. It's now a massive soup of evenly expanding plasma. Act three. The Universe cools. Matter starts to clump together under the force of gravity, eventually forming stars, galaxies, and planets. For most cosmologists, this three-act play is the best explanation for what happened at the beginning of the Universe. But not for everybody. Interpreting this as a beginning is indeed just a crutch. It's not derived from any theory. Dr. Martin Bojowald is a Professor of Physics at the institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State. He's a rising star in a new generation of cosmologists which is challenging some long-held beliefs about the Universe. Inflation may have fixed act two, but Martin thinks the play still starts with a very unlikely act one, the sudden and singular pop from nothing into the entire Universe. Alan Guth used the theory of inflation to dig down to a trillion, trillion, trillionth of a second after the beginning. Martin went a million times closer. In Bojowald's theory, time is not free-flowing, but made up of discrete, measurable chunks. These chunks of time are called "space-time atoms." It's a very different way of thinking about what happened before the beginning. The second hand on the quantized clock marks not just the beginning of one moment, but the end of another. The Universe expands and contracts, but it never actualy begins. There could have been a series of Universes before this one and more to come after this one. Bojowald is working through the problems and conundrums that all radical new theories face. In 2001, two of the leading cosmologists in the world published a paper suggesting an even more radical approach to what happened at the beginning. Our Universe may not be the only one, but one of hundreds, thousands, maybe an infinite number. It's an inspiring and daunting suggestion, the Universe is an endless cycle prompted by an endless series of bangs, forever. When you look out into space, gaze at a distant star, you also look back in time. According to Professor Martin Bojowald, time becomes squeezed and distorted as it nears a singularity and then bounces back out into another expansion. But perhaps there's an altogether different way to look at what happened before the beginning. South African scientist Dr. Neil Turok is now daring to go further into the past than almost anyone else. Across the Atlantic, another intrepid scientist labored to uncover the truth behind what happened before the beginning. Paul Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Princeton University. In 1999, the two men combined forces to see if they could answer some of their problems with the inflationary model of what happened at the beginning. String theory was developed in the last 35 years as an attempt to devise a single theory explaining everything in the Universe. It was rough this world of branes that Paul and Neil stumbled onto a potentially radical new theory of what happened before the beginning. So, here I have a piece of material, and it looks like a two-dimensional object, because one of the dimensions goes up and one goes side to side. But if we look a little bit closer at this object, and look at it from the side, you'll see that actually there are two pieces of material, separated by a tiny gap. And you could think of this gap as being the fourth dimension of space. And the collision of these two three-dimensional worlds, the one we live in and another one, would have been the Big Bang. It would be a collision, instead of a springing from nothingness. So, if the branes existed before and after, that means space and time existed before. The Big Bang is not the beginning. That means we have more time to solve all the cosmological problems that inflation was designed to solve. So, we began to imagine, "could we replace that idea with something that occurred before The Bang?" And as we were going along the train ride, we began to imagine lots of possibilities, so that by the end, it seemed like a very exciting alternative to the standard Big Bang inflationary picture. The three men and another physicist, Justin Khoury, worked feverishly to clarify and justify their initial spark of creativity. This mathematics didn't exist before. A new theory of the Universe starts to come alive. The picture we had in mind was two three-dimensional worlds stretching off to infinity but separated from each other by a tiny gap, a fourth dimension of space. The two three-dimensional worlds are actually pulled together by a very weak force. When the branes move apart again, they're now filled with the matter and radiation that was created at the collision. This then causes the branes to begin to expand again and cool, creating a new period of expansion, cooling, creation of new atoms, molecules, stars, and galaxies. We now had an explanation for the Big Bang. It was a radical and elegant solution to one of the great cosmic mysteries of all time. According to Neil and Paul and their colleagues Burt and Justin, there was always a time before time. After almost two years of work, it was time to present this new theory to their fellow scientists. At a conference in Finland, the two physicists laid out their theory. we were both rather depressed, so we began to travel along the River near Rovaniemi and have this discussion about "what could we replace this idea with?" So, we began to think about something that wasn't yet included in the theory, which was the idea of dark energy. Dark energy is a recent and totally surprising astronomical discovery, a mysterious force that's causing the Universe to expand even faster.


  What Happened Before the Beginning? Find answers from scientists David Spergel, Alan Guth, Martin Bojowald, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok
Launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
Launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe


The incredibly strange world of 11-dimensional space
The incredibly strange world of 11-dimensional space


Picture of the Universe just 380,000 years after its birth
Picture of the Universe just 380,000 years after its birth


Gravitational waves traveling through our part of the Universe
Gravitational waves traveling through our part of the Universe
  Eventually, the dark energy will expand the Universe so much that it will be nothing but cold and empty space. In the language of m-theory, that translates to a flat brane. The dark-energy phase stretches out the three-dimensional worlds and makes them very flat and very empty and very parallel. Of course, that immediately clicked with another idea. Well, we're using something now, but we're using it before the bang. Well, maybe the source of dark energy then was actually the same as the one now and the Universe is cyclic somehow. So, you could have a bang followed by a normal period of the Universe, like we live in today, followed by a second bang in our future, followed by another bang, and so on. There are bangs and bangs and bangs forever. Their theory was now complete. Two branes come together, inject one another with energy, then dark energy takes a trillion years or so to spread that energy out. The branes flatten and then come together again. This cycle happens endlessly. Neil Turok and Paul Steinhardt had come up with a remarkable alternative theory to the Big Bang and cracked the door onto what happened before the beginning. Professor Martin Bojowald's bouncing Universe is still a work in progress, but for proponents of the cyclic and the Big Bang inflation model, the answer to how and when the Universe started may be moving toward us across time and space like tiny ripples in the cosmic ocean gravitational waves.     The Planck satellite is the successor to WMAP. It will be measuring the sky with about twice the resolution and about 10 times the sensitivity. The Planck satellite is really the first device we have which seems to have a strong capability of maybe finding"these gravity waves. And if we're lucky, that'll tell us what happened during the first moments of the Big Bang, or maybe even before. But Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok are also looking forward to the Planck satellite results. In their cyclic model of the beginning of the Universe, two branes coming together would be a much less intense collision, and the chances are that gravitational waves would be almost nonexistent. If we observe these gravitational waves in the Planck satellite, that will support the inflationary theory and rule out the cyclic picture. And conversely, if we don't see them, that would strongly support the cyclic picture. But no matter which description of the beginning of the Universe appears to be more accurate, the true winner will be our own scientific understanding. Instead of appearing from nowhere and no-when and rising from stardust to humankind, we may have to consider the mind-boggling premise that we are just the latest version of an endless series of Universes. We still might not know what happened before the beginning. But we would know that something did. The final answer may be close at hand.
List with pictures of the scientists, in order of their appearance in Through the Wormhole What Happened Before the Beginning? documentary, who share us their knowledges:
David Spergel
David Spergel (physicst, Princeton)
  Alan Guth
Alan Guth (cosmologist)
  Martin Bojowald
Martin Bojowald (physicst, IGC Penn State)
  Neil Turok
Neil Turok (scientist, Perimeter Institute)
  Paul Steinhar
Paul Steinhardt (physicst, Princeton University)