There are a lot of different scientific and non-scientific ideas about what happened before the Big Bang. Some people say there was nothing, while others say there was a black hole or a lot of different worlds.
But now, a group of mathematicians from Canada and Egypt have used cutting-edge science and a complicated set of equations to try to figure out what came before our universe. Nature has printed their research paper.
To make it simple and easy to understand, they applied the theories of the very small, which come from quantum mechanics, to the whole universe, which is explained by the general theory of relativity. This is how they found that the universe goes through four main stages.
Even more important, they found out what was there before this universe. Another universe, or more specifically, a different “cosmological phase.”
Even though the universe is infinite in size, it has always been in one of four stages.
The universe is getting bigger, and it’s getting bigger faster. The team thinks that a change inspired by quantum mechanics will eventually stop the expansion and pull everything back to a point near infinity, where it will start to grow again.
The paper by Maha Salah, Faycal Hammad, Mir Faizal, and Ahmed Farag Ali called “Non-singular and Cyclic Universe from the Modified GUP” is very complicated, but Prof. Mir Faizal explained the main points.
He said that quantum mechanical effects have been added to cosmology using a method called the modified GUP.
This approach changes cosmology’s equation in a very interesting way. It says that our universe will go through four different stages, one of which is the stage we are in now.
In this model of the universe, there was a time before the big bang. We can learn about that time by studying the physics of the present time in the universe.
Mir Faizal, a professor, said:
In our model of how the universe began, it didn’t start with the “big bang.” Instead, there was a change from one phase of the universe to the next.
This is possible because the universe has four different states, just like water has three different states. Just as we can learn about the properties of ice by looking at the water that has formed from it, we can learn about the universe before the big bang by looking at how it works now.
In their model, they have been able to look at how the universe was before the Big Bang. Based on the equations in their model, they think that the universe will stop growing and then immediately start to shrink.
Prof Mir added:
When the equations are taken past the point where they can shrink no more, a cyclic universe scenario appears. “Other cosmologists have proposed a scenario with a “big bang” and a “big crunch,” but these models have singularities. Singularities are bad in physics because they show a place where the laws of physics don’t work, and you can’t use physics to get useful results in those places.
This kind of “singularity” is not part of the new model of the universe. By using the modified GUP corrections to cosmology, it is also possible to avoid the big bang singularity.
In their model of the universe, the fact that the universe is cyclical comes from adding quantum effects to a model of the universe.
Prof. Faizal said that even though there are many strange ways to look at quantum gravity, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, what most of them have in common is that space doesn’t exist below a certain length.
Many of these ideas also say that there is a maximum amount of energy, and nothing in the universe can have more energy than that.
The research team put the effect of having a minimum length and a maximum energy into a model of the universe. As a result, they got a model of a universe that goes in cycles.
When asked what his work meant in terms of philosophy and maybe even religion, Prof. Mir said:
No one thinks that a finite or an infinite space dimension has any philosophical or theological implications, and time is just another dimension, so why should it be treated any differently?
In any case, I don’t believe in a God of gaps, with the big bang being a big gap, but I do believe in a God who made the math that describes reality so perfect that there are no gaps, not now and not at the big bang.
