• Question: What, if anything, do you think there was before the big bang?

    Asked by astroaaron to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 16 Nov 2011. This question was also asked by holdl004.
    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      My favourite theory is one proposed by Professor Roger Penrose and that is that the Universe has always been around but it goes in cycles. The Universe is expanding and cooling. It looks like there will be a time, billions of years on the future, where all of the matter – the stars, planets and everything in between – fall into ever larger Black Holes. There will then be a period in the Universe where there is nothing but super massive Black Holes that can never know each other exists (can’t be causally connected). As the Universe continues to expand and cool there will become a point at which a Black Hole is warmer than the surrounding empty space – at this point the Black Hole with spew new matter into the Universe in an almighty explosion, creating the next Universe. This cycle continues forever and ever. No beginning and no end.

      There are people looking for signs of this theory by looking for ripples, just like when you drop a stone into water. The ripples are not in water but in the oldest light in the Universe which we call the Cosmic Microwave Background.

    • Photo: Katharine Schofield

      Katharine Schofield answered on 15 Nov 2011:

      Hi astroaaron

      I honestly don’t know – no-one does! There is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the Big Bang did happen. It seems to be the accepted theory (although the chap who first used the term Big Bang, Fred Hoyle, did so to try to show what a load of rubbish it was). I am not even sure what the concept of ‘before’ the Big Bang really means. It’s a great question though and one which will keep scientists and philosophers puzzling for a long long time to come.

    • Photo: Mark Basham

      Mark Basham answered on 16 Nov 2011:

      Not really my area of expertise and I’m probably a few years behind on the topic but so as far as I know the Universe will eventually ( and in a really long time ) go into “heat death” which means that it will all just be spread thinly. But where it comes from I’m not sure, I like the idea of cyclic universes though like Ben said but its all theory at the moment 🙂

      However there is lots of cool science being done at facilities arround the world to try to understand it more.

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