What Happened Before the Beginning?

What Happened Before the Beginning

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Everything around us came from the hot Big Bang. The Universe started out Big Bang Theory very, very hot, very dense. That hot radiation cooled. From that emerged matter, radiation, everything that makes up the world around us. And here we are at Bell Labs at Crawford Hill, the place where the hot Big Bang theory really all started, in some ways.
The first moments of the Big Bang - picture Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson are a pair of radio astronomers who worked here at Bell Laboratories. We just didn't know what to do with that result. Consulting with a team of Princeton physicists, Wilson and Penzias realized that the only reason something could come from every part of the sky is if it were actually a faint echo of a huge cosmic event. A picture of the beginning of time and space was starting to emerge. The Big Bang happened everywhere on the surface of the balloon. The accidental discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation earned the two radio engineers the Nobel prize for Physics. It also gave scientists the first good estimate of when the Big Bang happened between 12 and 14 billion years ago. Our understanding of the Universe would never be the same. 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. Spergel's dream was taking flight. We're looking back to when the Universe was only 300,000 years old. That's the moment at which the Universe became cold enough that electrons and protons combined to make hydrogen. Hydrogen is transparent to microwave light, so light could then travel freely from then to now. Two years later, the results are in. First results from NASA's Wilkinson microwave. We take the Universe's baby picture, and we see what it looked like when it was a few days old. We can then use that picture to look at how we got from the baby picture to the Universe we see today. But perhaps even more exciting, 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.
What Happened Before the Beginning - picture The Universe that we see is, in fact, unbelievably uniform, and that's hard to understand, because conventional explosions don't behave that way. But other scientists have different ideas about what might have happened at that moment of singularity. The physical laws break down. The mathematical equations just don't make sense anymore. The beginning of time is about to get a whole lot stranger. The early Universe was nothing like what's on the canvas here. Alan needed something that would immediately smooth out all the hot, dense plasma that had just come into existence. I came across this idea of inflation, the idea that gravity can, under some circumstances, act repulsively and produce a gigantic acceleration in the expansion of the Universe, and that this could have happened in the very early Universe. The key idea behind inflation is the possibility that at least a small patch of the early Universe contained this peculiar kind of repulsive-gravity material. 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. 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. A singularity just means we don't understand the theory well enough. 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 tick that signaled dawn in our Universe marks one second past midnight in the last. So, we have this balloon Universe. If we imagine what it could have been before the Big Bang, it was collapsing, so the volume was shrinking. Now, if we follow the usual evolution, according to general relativity, that would have been ending in a singularity.
The biggest cosmic mysteries of all - picture There could have been a series of Universes before this one and more to come after this one. But 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. For these two scientists, there was another answer so strange and unexpected that it had never been considered. The light from that cosmic backdrop has taken 13.7 billion years to make it to Earth. What lies beyond that curtain? 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. 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. As a young man, Paul was inspired to study science by the moon landings. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. 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. Inflation had some extraordinary successes, so it's tough competition to compete with inflation. What would happen then? And is it possible the Big Bang is not a beginning, but is a collision? And his response was, maybe. The meeting soon broke up, but the three men had all been invited to attend the same play in London that evening. We met at the train platform, and then we began to really imagine this idea in more detail about what it would mean if the Big Bang were not a beginning but the Big Bang were a collision. It was rough this world of branes that Paul and Neil stumbled onto a potentially radical new theory of what happened before the beginning.
Variations in the background radiation - picture So, if the branes existed before and after, that means space and time existed before. They could have helped set up the conditions we observe in the Universe today they collide, and they move apart again. 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? This mathematics didn't exist before. A new theory of the Universe starts to come alive. 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. As different as the models are, they produce the same exact variations in the background radiation. The same WMAP image fits both ideas. It's truly the case that when WMAP made its announcement, the way most people interpreted that announcement was, it's beautifully consistent with the Big Bang inflationary picture. To us, it meant that the cyclic model was in the game as much as inflation was. But which theory is right? The answer to one of the biggest cosmic mysteries of all was there a time before our time? What happened before the beginning? The question is posed. Sides are drawn. And if we're lucky, that'll tell us what happened during the first moments of the Big Bang, or maybe even before. For proponents of The Big Bang inflation model, finding significant gravitational waves would be the final step in proving that there was a giant expansion of whooshing energy from a place of nowhere and no-when. 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. 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. Yeah, to me, it's man against nature. We're trying to figure out nature's secrets. If we're lucky, we'll be surprised. These tiny, almost undetectable waves will have a tsunami-like effect on the future direction of cosmology. 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.

Also you can watch online the others episodes of Through the Wormhole documentary movie film as Through The Wormhole: Is There A Creator?, The Riddle of Black Holes, Is Time Travel Possible?, How Did We Get Here?, Are We Alone?, What Are We Made Of?, Beyond The Darkness.