Evidence of the Universe From Before the Big Bang?
How an observational signature from Cosmic Inflation could herald the scientific revolution of the century
“Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” -Alan Guth
When you think back to the beginning of the Universe, you very likely think of a hot, dense, matter-and-radiation filled state that’s expanding and cooling at an incredibly rapid rate. (That’s correct, by the way.) But what you can’t do is extrapolate back to an arbitrarily hot, dense state. You might think that you can go all the way back to a “singularity” of infinite temperature and infinite density, where all the energy in the Universe was compressed into a single point, but that’s simply not true.
You see, one of the remarkable things about the Universe is that the radiation from this time is still around. While it bounced around between charged particles when the Universe was young, hot and ionized, that only lasted for the first 380,000 years or so. When the Universe became electrically neutral (as in, when the…
