Here are some points on the Big Bang.
What was there before the Big Bang?
Before the Big Bang there was an energy singularity with no space, time, matter or gravitation, and zero density. There is a way to “see” this primeval body; it cannot disappear without causing every object spawned by it to also vanish. By lacking spacetime the energy singularity appears to have existed “then”, continues to exist now, and will remain undisturbed in its “place” even if our universe disappears.
Why do cosmologists disagree on what existed before the Big Bang?
The tested instrument that made the Big Bang a necessity is of no application before the very beginning. General relativity concerns space, time, mass, energy and gravitation, but the theory says these phenomena debuted together 13.8 billion years ago, throwing no light on what may have existed before such a bizarre epoch. Events prior to the Big Bang are deemed to be unobservable, their information lost to us. Even in the face of such impediments, cosmologists lack no ideas on what may have caused the universe into being. Scenarios range from a universe undergoing an endless cycle of birth, collapse and rebirth; a mechanism—eternal inflation—bringing into being a myriad of universes, making ours a part of a “multiverse”; the idea that the universe is confined to a sort of membrane inside a higher dimensional space—the “hyperspace”—and many others, including the possibility that “nothing” split in two opposite halves so that the total energy of the universe is zero (0=1-1), have been advanced.
Why have physicists never proposed a singularity made purely of energy?
Physicists are concerned solely with their subject matter, persuaded that physics is a senior science taking precedence over the rest. Because this is also the general opinion, they overlooked the known solution to the only other two “origins” dilemmas.
Evolution, an old subject.
Science first stumbled with an “origins” mystery in the second half of the 19th century. A couple of English biologists faced a seemingly impossible question: were current lifeforms created in their present shape or were they descended from earlier ancestors? What they found was evidence for an evolution. A series of slightly varying creatures, increasingly fewer and more rustic as one got into the past, produced the astonishing variety of earth’s life—science now places a single cell as the ancestor to all modern life. The ensuing scandal was to be made worse by one of the two Victorians who clung to the matter in regard to humans. Did we also descend from more primitive animals? He said yes and devoted a book to examine the issue at length. What about the top question, the emergence of life itself? Before the creation of the first living creature there was only ordinary matter, so Darwin envisioned life arising out of self-assembling organic compounds in a “warm little pond” bathed in heat, light and electricity.
The key to all “origins” conundrums.
Darwin showed how discontinuous, seemingly incongruous qualities emerge from an unbroken chain of events. His method to the origin of new phenomena was to look in the preexistent, simpler environment. By following it he got the right answers, twice. Humans originated from primates and life from organic compounds ultimately made of ordinary matter.
Where the arrow of simplicity points to.
The straightforward mechanism of evolution forces us to look for some simpler, preexisting body capable of spawning the entire universe. It should have known traits; it should be completely “dark” in our eyes and yet very visible if properly looked for; its constituent stuff should be very ordinary and yet capable of taking many different shapes.
The law of conservation of energy.
The law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. By this law there should be an initial inventory of energy to create the universe. Energy lacks corporeality and yet it is a real physical property. As a conserved quantity, energy is also unaffected by time—Einstein showed that time and space are part of the same continuum, spacetime, so anything alien to space is also so to time. Lacking corporeality and time does not prevent energy to transform itself into other, even tangible, forms.
The mass-energy equivalence principle.
Einstein showed that mass and energy are equivalent. Initially just a convenient theoretical tool, experimental physicists found practical ways to use this principle to transform mass and energy into each other. Atomic bombs and reactors have been made to release huge quantities of energy. In the other end, protons brought to a speed close to light are made to clash in frontal collisions to produce much more massive particles than those of the protons involved. More complex, tridimensional mass, abounding in uncountable chemical varieties, is made of energy.
The energy of the void.
By the end of the last century, cosmologists found that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. A low-density, “dark” energy, first proposed by Einstein as a “cosmological constant”, is doing the pushing. It has been referred to as the “energy of space itself”, the “energy of the void”, or “vacuum energy”. There is a catch. As the universe expands, in order to keep the thrust constant, more and more space has to be created. At the scale of the whole universe, energy is not conserved; more energy is coming from an unknown source.
The other space, the quantum vacuum.
Quantum mechanics is the other general physical theory. It describes nature at the scale of atoms, nuclei and subatomic particles. It is inconsistent with general relativity because quantum phenomena have no equivalent in general relativity. One fine example is the uncertainty principle. Quantum field theory treats the void as populated by fields that never go away. The uncertainty principle forbids knowing with precision the value of a field at a point in space. If a point in space were to lack particles, the field’s precise value would be known—it would have zero energy. The vacuum is thus populated by quantum fluctuations, virtual particles that pop into and out of existence. Because their contribution is however positive, the quantum vacuum has energy—even infinite energy. Unlike the constant density of the “dark” energy, in the quantum realm, the smaller the scale, the greater the vacuum energy density—as smaller wavelengths traduce into higher frequencies. Calculations jump many zeroes when going from the scale of atoms to that of nuclei to that of a thousandth of nuclei. Physicists stop at the Planck scale because beyond this scale existing theories make no sense. At this point the vacuum energy density reaches 110^112 ergs/cm3. The measured density of dark energy is 10^-8 ergs/cm3. There is a gap of 120 zeroes between the energy of the space at the cosmic scale and that of space at the quantum scale. This disparity alone should tell physicists that the two vacuums do not refer to the same phenomenon.
The energy singularity.
The incredibly thick energy barrier—much denser than matter—surrounding the universe in the direction of the very small is the energy singularity. This body is so archaic that it lacks spacetime; this is how it managed to exist “before” the Big Bang. Since gravitation is a geometric property of spacetime, the huge energy of this singularity does not have any gravitational effects on our universe.
From the energy singularity to the universe.
Starting with the energy singularity, the first step to produce the universe is the creation of spacetime: a bubble, membrane, higher-dimensional world “inside” the dimensionless singularity, driven by inflation, a false vacuum, or some other spontaneous reaction of the original medium, such as a “quantum fluctuation”. The accompanying event is the leakage of some of the—very simple—bundles of energy into the new medium. The space-less quanta then assemble into the 64 known species of elementary particles. Thanks to the second-generation phenomenon of spacetime, quanta can further bond and aggregate into the tridimensional arrays we know as matter.
Quantum phenomena and why no one understands them.
The simplest parts of a structure cannot disappear without causing it to also vanish. It follows that if the most elementary pieces of our universe come from the pre-Big Bang era, we should be able to confirm this, today. By taking a close look at the smallest chunks of matter—elementary particles, atoms and molecules—physicists have “seen” them dissolve into waves. The particles reappear after some sort of interaction, usually a collision with a macroscopic object, an event called a “measurement”. Much of this process is actually unobservable; the waves are mathematically modelled and there is a strong indication that they are just “probability waves”—a piece of math—describing unphysical objects that exist at best in some sublayer of reality. We have problem dealing with this other, subtler layer of reality because our mind is not well suited to ponder events occurring in the absence of space and time.
Violations of ordinary logic by quantum phenomena.
Nontechnical accounts of quantum phenomena have provided us with illustrations such as the following. Quantum objects exist as superpositions of different states; they can be in more than one place at the same time. An electron within an atom can jump from one place to another without crossing the intervening space. Quantum objects can tunnel through barriers. If one wants to know the precise position of a particle then one cannot know its precise momentum and vice versa. Quantum objects going from point A to point B follow all possible paths simultaneously. Entangled particles can interact instantly across space. One cannot observe anything without disturbing it. In these examples the concepts of space, time and corporeality are violated. The reason is that quantum objects lack space—and hence corporeality—whether immersed in space or matter. If freely flying when “measured”—disturbed—by a collision or obstacle, such objects behave weirdly. Depending on the type of interaction, they can show wave or particle-like characteristics, and the measurement of the whole set of their properties by classical standards, as if they were true particles, is unattainable.
The origin of probability in quantum mechanics.
Quantum formalism—its mathematical apparatus—cannot predict the outcome of single interactions such as the precise spot where an electron fired against a screen will appear. Rather, it provides the probabilities to observe one of the possible outcomes. The predicted distribution of probabilities appears only after many runs of the same experiment. Why? There is no equivalent between a “non-object” suspended in a space-less sphere and one existing in space and time. Imagine a cat posing for us, in the dark. At one time it will be standing and at a different one, sitting. It can be licking its right paw or the left one. It can face us, show us one of its sides or appear tail first. All these are valid “configurations” for the cat to be in. Suppose now that we have a light that lets us take a glance at the cat each time we flash it. With each flash we will see a single “configuration” of the cat. In no case we will be able to anticipate it, all we will know is that we will see a valid configuration. The many states of the cat—its entire shape or structure—will be evident only after many flashes.
Entanglement.
The phenomenon of entanglement is especially illustrative on how a space-less object behaves in spacetime. Two electrons are entangled if the properties of each depend on the properties of the other—the pair is said to share the same wavefunction. For instance, if one is in a “spin up” configuration, the other will have the other, “spin down”. While freely flying they are supposed to be in a superposition of the two states—really an unphysical state foreign to spatial traits. Now, it is possible to send the electrons in opposite directions. Suppose that a measurement is performed on one of them. If the outcome is “spin down”, we will find the partner in the opposite, “spin up” configuration. In other words, the particles communicate instantly across space. Why? The reason is that their primary bond is more elementary, so it supersedes their spatial relationship.
Conclusion. Four singularities: the energy singularity, the universe, life, and humans.
Biologists use the term “singularity” to refer to events or properties that are single or unique, for instance, landmarks in the history of life. Speaking from a broader perspective, Spanish biochemist Juan Oró says that there are three large singularities in the world: the universe, life, and humans. The problem with this statement is that there are two mutually inconsistent physical theories competing to describe Oró’s first singularity, the universe. The solution to this conundrum first requires understanding that the problem of the origin of the universe belongs in the same category as the other two solved by Darwin. Once the necessity of a simpler body is realized, its nature is easy to elaborate. What follows is the question of how such a space-less, timeless body fits in the framework of science. Realizing its relationship with the many weirdnesses of quantum mechanics requires much harder work. At its inception, the present work had nothing to do with physics. Its purpose was to device a way to a science of the fourth singularity, human history, but that is another story.
(1) Life’s Origin: The beginnings of biological evolution
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