Why, scientifically, are we unable to figure out what happened before the big bang?
In: Physics
When you want to examine things that are very massive, you use the equations of general relativity.
When you want to examine things that are very small, you use the equations of quantum mechanics.
When you want to examine things that are very massive AND very small (black holes, the state of the early universe) you have to use both.
But when you try you get nonsensical answers like “infinity” which indicate something has broken down.
So the reason why we can’t figure out what happened shortly after, at, or before, the Big Bang is because the tools we use to “figure” those things out break down. They don’t produce sensible answers.
It’s kind of like asking you what you were thinking about in the years *before* you were born.
You can’t tell me. Because there was no “you” before you were born and became “you.”
We have observational evidence that the observable universe is expanding and therefore appears to have “exploded” from the big bang. The most compelling hypothesis for what happened before was the big crunch and part of a theory called the big bounce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce
Like a balloon that’s repeatedly blown up, then thinks, then blown up again.
Obviously, we have no observational evidence of what happened before, but we do know that gravity “should” be attracting matter to other matter.
Time started with the Big Bang. There was no “before”.
It is OK if you can’t picture this. None of us can.
Because the big bang is just a theory (not a game theory) and we don’t know what actually happened but the big bang is the most popular theory. Anything could have happened really. Nothing is out of the question at all. We could have been an experiment and another civilization could be monitoring us like we are some sort of pet
There are three problems. The first is that scientists can’t really gather information about even the earliest moments of the Big Bang because energy couldn’t really escape. There was a period when everything was just *too hot* and electrons couldn’t bind to atomic nuclei. Since everything was still so dense, the whole universe was a super dense sea of charged particles. Light gets absorbed by charged particles. With the universe so stuffed full of them, light could barely travel at all before almost immediately running into a free electron or proton and getting absorbed again. So, sure, there was a *ton* of light but we can’t see any of it because it was all reabsorbed.
There was a period called *Recombination* when the universe expanded and cooled enough for electrons to bond to protons, making the universe suddenly way more transparent. The light from that moment is what we see now as the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Believe it or not, scientists *can* get information from before Recombination. One way is to look at patterns in the CMB that arose from tiny variations in gravity, which come from tiny variations in density. If you imagine a universe where all particles are *perfectly* distributed, then the gravity between them would be pulling equally in all directions and no particle would move towards its neighbor. Because of random fluctuations in energy, some parts of space just had a *tiny* bit more stuff in it, which caused matter to collapse at those points a little bit more and the “supernova” energy being released there sent out ripples of energy that caused particles around that point to collapse, too. This all happened before Recombination, and those ripples can still be seen in the CMB thanks to clever scientists who figured out to look for them and figured out how to find them.
Before that, though, there’s just not any kind of radiation that still exists. Everything was so hot and dense and energetic that you’re either going to find a mess of random static *or* absolutely nothing for the same reason that you won’t find fossils in an active volcano. It all just got reabsorbed and emitted and reabsorbed and emitted again until Recombination.
The other problem is that our understanding of physics just stops working in the conditions of the Big Bang. Scientists understand how stuff behaves at really big scales and at really small scales. The early universe was *both*: incomprehensibly high amounts of energy and matter stuffed into the smallest space, everywhere. Scientists just don’t have the tools to interpret how particles and energy behave under those conditions. Even trying to use computer models won’t work because the models have to use known laws as the foundation, which don’t work for those conditions.
The last problem is that “before” the Big Bang doesn’t really make sense. Time is a property of the universe we are in now and there’s no guarantee that time or entropy or any of the laws of physics as we recognize them worked the same way or even existed before the Big Bang. It’s a bit like asking what letter comes before A in the alphabet? That question can’t be answered because there’s no alphabet before the alphabet.
“*What happened before the Big Bang?*”
“What happened” implies that there was *something* around for stuff to happen to. There was no such *something*; there was nothing.
“Before” implies events arranged in time so we can consider something happening before something else, but we have no idea what “time” before the Big Bang even means.
Is this something we can get our heads around? No, it’s just the way things are.
Imagine the universe is an inflated balloon and our planet is floating around inside it somewhere. We can’t see whats outside the balloon, because we don’t know if there even is an outside.
The big bang was the start of the inflation of the balloon, we can tell the balloon is getting bigger but not what was happening before it started inflating because we can’t penetrate the walls to look outside.
Because, scientifically the ‘big bang’ is just a theory or concept that we use to try and explain how the universe began and we have no way of definitively proving that’s how it went down.
A very simplified explanation is that the concept of time is a parameter of this universe, so there is simply no kind of time or causality like we know it “before the big bang”, and also no “what caused the big bang” as both notions need time to work out somehow.
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