An article at Physorg.com has me thinking. My son sent it to me before I found it myself. It has to do with the Big Bang and what might have existed, if anything before that auspicious event. In the scientific community this is big news. Cosmologists and theoretical physicists had carefully avoided asking that very question for decades, claiming that pre-big-bang speculation is pointless, or at the very least belongs to the more whimsical mind-set of the philosophers.
Recently, however, some of them may be having a change of heart. Several Smart People from prestigious universities are working on esoteric mathematical landscapes which may offer some insight into whatever was before everything was, if you get my drift. I savor the irony of this burgeoning paradigm shift because for my entire lifetime these top-notch thinkers (and I mean that sincerely) have stubbornly demanded that nothing existed prior to the Singularity which suddenly, for an unknown reason, expanded and created the known universe.
Now, we teachers know that when writing a true or false test question, making bold, declarative statements involving words and phrases like, “nothing”, “every time”, “in all cases”, “never”, “always”, etc., will make the answer to any question false about 90% of the time. There are almost always exceptions. I have always been mildly amused when the scientific community uses absolute declarations like these—and the Big Bang is a perfect example—and then get all huffy when religionists do it. Absolutism is the calling card of religion while skepticism and eternal suspicion are the hallmarks of science. Yet they use these kinds of terms as often as any prophet.

“I tell you there was nothing before the big bang! It would have been absolutely impossible!”

“The Milky Way makes up the known universe—there can be no doubt about that.”

“Any speed faster than 60 MPH must prove fatal to any human being!”

And so on. But it’s hard to stay mad at them. They’re such madcap guys and gals. So new calculations delving into what I’m sure is black magic masquerading as mathematics are giving certain scientists the idea that something might have existed before the Big Bang after all—this after fifty years of renowned thinkers spending their entire professional careers contemplating the time sequence between one femto-second after the Big Bang initiated, to about three seconds after. A few of them took the bull by the horns and went so far as to speculate hours, even years after the sudden, apparently random birth of our reality. The topic will continue to be hotly debated, I’m sure, until the end of time—or at least the end of government grants—and will doubtless never be resolved until we, to quote Stephen Hawking, “Know the mind of God.”
But here’s the real juicy part. The “evidence” now suggest (Remember, this is from peer-reviewed publications) that there might have been a universe exactly like ours prior to ours. Which is just another, terribly unscientific way of saying “the universe existed before the universe came into existence.” They are claiming now that if we were to look at that old universe at the same age as this one now (131/2- 15 billion years) it would be indistinguishable from our own. Wow. So let’s see . . . old universe, new universe, exactly alike . . . some kind of bizarre compression in between, then a sudden expansion . . . almost makes it sound like various natural phases of the same universe, doesn’t it? Which is what religion has been saying all along. Except for that one which says nothing is real. Oh, and that other one which insists the universe is infinite, and has no beginning and no end. But that quack-basket is Christianity and everybody knows that particular religion is not only completely out of fashion, but politically unacceptable as well. Darn, and I thought we’d stumbled onto something here.
“Aha!” A skeptic might say, “you’ve forgotten about entropy! Everybody knows the universe can’t be eternal because energy is constantly being lost, the whole thing is winding down to the inevitable heat death at the restaurant at the end of the universe! Why, in another ten billion years or so, all the stars will be cool cinders, there will be no life, no warmth, no atomic movement. That’s a pretty pessimistic outlook, but okay, let’s look at it. I’ve always wondered where the law of conservation of energy fits into the death of the universe. If neither matter nor energy can be created nor destroyed (an idea I am willing to accept for the time being), then where is all the energy going for the next ten billion years? Is it being turned into matter? Do electrons finally just get tired of spinning their frantic lives and die? If so, where did their energy go? (I’m confident there are answers to those questions, I just don’t know what they are.) And what about the notion that life is a universe-wide anti-entropic phenomenon, taking energy and using it to create ever-increasing levels of order and organization? Humans being the penultimate example of that “natural process”. We create order. We change things. Life does the same. Look at the chaotic nature of the energy being emitted by the sun; useless for anything other than heat and light right? But it gets to earth and is absorbed by OMG! Living things, which turn it into all kinds of highly complex processes, new chemical compounds, and energy producing systems. What if life is sufficiently ubiquitous that it acts as a balance—universally—against entropy? Now where’s your ‘heat death’ Carl Sagan? (I love[ed] Carl Sagan.)
I have always believed in an infinite and eternal universe for two reasons. One, mom and dad did (and I’ve never known anyone smarter or wiser), and two, it is easier for me to imagine a universe without a beginning or an end than it is to imagine a finite universe springing from nothing. I have a really hard time with any kind of spontaneous generation concept. But that’s just me.
Eventually, they are going to discover that the Big Bang never happened at all, and the universe has always been here. They will discover another explanation for the famous ‘background radiation’ that ‘proves’ the big band happened. I’m patient, I’ll wait. And if it turns out I’m wrong, I will be sure to post a retraction where everyone can see it. You know, like all those scientists and politicians do.