Romy asks, “What was before the Big Bang?”
Imagine you’re sitting in an armchair, superglued to the seat, staring at a brick wall. The wall is so tall you can’t see over it, so thick you can’t hear through it, so strong you can’t break it no matter what you throw. What’s on the other side?
If you’re looking for a concrete answer, prepare to be disappointed. People have been asking this question for thousands of years. Back then it was religious thinkers. Today it’s physicists. And even though we know a lot more about The Beginning now, we haven’t gotten much better at The Before.
For example, here’s an answer from the 300s (yes, the 300s!) by a religious thinker named St. Augustine:
… before God made heaven and earth, He made not anything. For if He did, what did He make … ?
He’s saying that when God created all this stuff, he also created space and time itself. Asking what happened before time existed might not even make sense.
Our answer today is mostly the same, but we can be more precise.
We know — beyond any shred of doubt — that the Universe is getting bigger, that all its galaxies are moving away from each other, and that everything used to be very, very close together. We know that there was a time when all the heat and all the mass of everything that has ever existed was packed smaller than an atom. You can think of the baby Universe as a very hot, very heavy marble.
When things gets that small, that hot, that dense, our normal approach breaks down. Any clues from before the Big Bang — any fingerprints or echoes — got garbled up and mixed with literally everything else. No matter how good our telescopes, we can’t see through that infinitely small peephole into The Before.
And now the question is more philosophical than scientific. Here we are, sitting on this side of a cosmic brick wall, with no way to ever interact with the other side. So what’s on the other side?
If you want, you can say the question is meaningless: as far as we’re concerned, there may as well be no other side. But that’s no fun.
A better way to look at it is that no answer is wrong. If I ask you, “What color is a wug?” then you can answer “gold” or “blue-green” or “heliotrope” and you’ll be right, if that’s how you choose to define a wug. So you can put whatever you want on the other side of that cosmic brick wall and you’ll be just as right as anyone in this Universe can ever be.
More on this: Stephen Hawking, The Beginning of Time
More from Romy Asks
Originally published at milobeckman.com on October 4, 2014.
