What happened before the big bang?
Published: 20 May 2012 (GMT+10)
A BBC documentary with this title was aired on SBS-TV in Australia in April, 2012. In it, several cosmologists discuss ‘the unthinkable’—perhaps the big bang was not the beginning of everything after all. It seems that scientists have discovered a new law. Well, not actually new—just one that has been treated as if it didn’t exist for the last half century or so by ‘big-bangers’ such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Edwin Hubble, et al, namely the law of Cause and Effect.
The program explains that the concept of the big bang1 postulates that “everything we see in the universe today—us, trees, galaxies, zebras—emerged, in an instant, from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.” We are then given five different explanations from five different scientists concerning what this cause may (or may not) have been.
Prof. Michio Kaku and the meaning of ‘nothing’
Dr Michio Kaku is Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University, New York. He asks: “How can it be that everything comes from nothing?” His solution: “If you think about it a while, you begin to realise it all depends on how you define ‘nothing’!”2
We are then shown a huge NASA vacuum chamber, the largest in the world—the nearest we can get to a state of nothing, but which still has dimensions (‘nothing in 3D’), and through which light can pass. Prof. Kaku tells us: “I think there are two kinds of nothing. First there is something I call absolute nothing: no equations, no space, no time, no anything that the human mind can conceive of, just nothing. Then there is the vacuum which is nothing but the absence of matter.”
The host then comments: “Prof. Kaku’s version of nothing is the perfect vacuum where on the face of it there is only energy. But in a perfect vacuum, energy sometimes transforms itself temporarily and briefly into matter. It is one of these tiny explosions that might have been going on and ended up in the big bang.”
Prof. Kaku: “So for me the universe did not come from absolute nothing—that is a state of no equations, no empty space, no time; it came from a pre-existing state—also a state of nothing. Our universe did in fact come from an infinitesimally tiny little explosion that took place giving us the big bang, and giving us the galaxies and stars we have today.”
The host: “For Prof. Kaku, the laws of physics did not arrive with the big bang. The appearance of matter did not start with the clock of time. His interpretation of nothing tells us there was, in short, a ‘before’. If he is right, there is an opportunity for a cause to have an effect, after all.”
Prof. Andrei Linde’s ‘radical explanation’—inflation
The host continues: “The idea of the big bang was a very bold idea but it had problems. … Why is the universe as big as it is now? Who made it expand? What caused the explosion? The big bang was clearly a very special explosion. Ordinary explosions are messy. This one produced a universe that wasn’t messy at all. Our universe is, more or less, the same in every direction. It was an observation that required a radical explanation.”
According to Dr Andrei Linde, who is Professor of Physics at Stanford University: “Just after matter first appeared, rather than a messy explosion, there was instead a massive and unprecedented growth in the size of the universe. This is called Inflation. If one assumes there was a period of exponential expansion of the universe in some energetic vacuum-like state, then you can explain why the universe is so large, why the universe is so small at a very large scale, why properties of the universe in different parts are so similar to each other. All these questions can be addressed if one uses inflation.”
The host: “Inflation was a pre-existing condition that has been there, well, for ever. For Prof. Linde, the big bang wasn’t really a starting point at all; he thinks that it was simply the end of something else. The universe appeared out of what he calls eternal inflation. Our universe is not the only one. There are others, all co-existing. He has counted them. There are ten to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7. His ideas of a multi-verse, as odd as they seem, are now within the scientific mainstream. For many cosmologists eternal inflation is in itself a reasonable explanation of what existed before our universe. For others it’s utter nonsense.” (Emphasis added.)
Dr Param Singh, the big bounce
Dr Singh is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In the program he tells us: “The principal mathematical objection [to the universe expanding from nothing] is that as the clock is wound back and Hubble’s zero hour is approached, all the stuff in the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics, invoking infinity is the same as giving up, or cheating.” (Emphasis added.)
His solution: “Instead of emerging from nothing, our universe owes its existence to a previous one that had the misfortune to collapse in on itself. Then, thanks to some clever maths, rebounded to what we see today. So the big bang was not a bang at all. It was rather a big bounce. … Of course it might all be nothing more than a fantasy world of maths and little else, and there’s always the nagging question of what started the infinite bouncing in the first place. It was certainly not the big bang. That is impossible.” (Emphasis added.)
Prof. Lee Smolin, natural selection
Prof. Smolin is a researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. We are told that his solution owes more to Charles Darwin than to Albert Einstein. It has been called ‘cosmological natural selection’. He believes that the universe had an ancestor which had another ancestor. According to this hypothesis, the universe was born inside a black hole.
Prof. Smolin: “There is a bounce inside every black hole. Material contracts and contracts and contracts again, and then begins to expand again, and that is the big bang which initiates the new region of the universe.” The commentator adds: “Smolin’s natural selection idea proposes that for a universe to prosper it must reproduce and for that to happen it must contain black holes that, according to Smolin, spawn offspring universes.”
Prof Smolin: “Before the big bang there was another universe much like our own. In that universe was a big cloud of gases. It collapsed to form a massive star. That star exploded. It left behind a black hole and in that black hole there was a region, if you were misfortunate enough to fall in, you would find it becoming denser and denser and denser. You wouldn’t survive this but imagine you did—then all of a sudden you would explode again and that would be our big bang.”
Dr Neil Turok, membranes collided
Dr Neil Turok is the Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada.3 He says: “There are essentially two possibilities at the beginning. Either time did not exist before the beginning; somehow time sprang into existence. That’s a notion we have no grasp of and which may be a logical contradiction. The other possibility is that this event which initiated our universe was a violent event in a pre-existing universe.
His solution requires ten special dimensions plus time. Dr Turok: “We live on an extended object called a brane (short for membrane). … You can’t have only one; there must be at least two, separated by a gap. These two branes collide. When they collide they remain extended; it’s not all of space shrinking to a point. … They fill with a density of plasma and matter, but it’s finite. Everything is a definite number which you can calculate, and which you can then describe using definite mathematical laws. That’s the essential picture of the big bang in our model.”
The host comments: “For many cosmologists this is mathematical sleight of hand.” (Emphasis added.)
The program then conveniently summarizes these ideas and asks which is correct:
Michio Kaku: Stop thinking of nothing as nothing, but rather just the absence of stuff.
Andrei Linde: He redefined the big bang as inflationary energy of a mega burst dying out ten to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7.
Param Singh: No big bang at all; just the big bounce, again and again and again.
Lee Smolin: Our big bang was simply the other side of a black hole in a galaxy far, far away.
Neil Turok: Colliding branes in another dimension.
The host: “They would be easier to dismiss as the half-baked musings of the lunatic fringe were it not for the fact that some of the very people who constructed the everything-from-nothing big bang model are themselves starting to dismantle it.”
Sir Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. For many years he spent much of his time dismissing the idea of ‘before the big bang’. He now says: “The current picture of the universe is that it starts with a big bang and it ends with an exponentially expanding universe, where it eventually cools off with not much left except protons. … This very expanded universe is the equivalent to a big bang of another one. … This universe is one eon of a succession of eons. Each expanding universe accounts for the big bang of the next.”
The host adds: “Because of this a nearly infinitely large universe could just as well be the infinitely small starting point for the next one. A simplistic system with a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Quite a bold thrust for a man who was until five years ago a pre-big-bang denier.”
We are then told that “in science ideas are just ideas until they are confirmed or denied by observations” and the program discusses how researchers are investigating gravity waves in an effort to observe the big bang itself.
The program concludes with Prof. Kaku telling us: “My parents were Buddhists. In Buddhism there is no beginning, no end, there is just nirvana.4 As a child I also went to Sunday school, where we learned that there was an instant where God said, ‘Let there be light.’ I kept these two mutually contrasting paradigms in my head, but now we can know these two paradigms together in a pleasing whole. Yes, there was a genesis. Yes, there was a big bang. And it happens all the time.”
Some concluding thoughts
Discerning viewers of this BBC program will have noticed several things:
- Almost all the concepts of the big bang are now under attack by secular scientists, e.g. that everything came from nothing, that everything was once contained in a singularity, the beginning of time, the origin of the laws of physics.
- All the ‘solutions’ to the problem of what happened before the big bang involve pre-existing universes or conditions, at least one of which is said to have existed for ever, despite the second law of thermodynamics (which says this is an impossibility).
- The proponents of these ‘solutions’ provide no physical evidence whatsoever in support of their ideas.
- Not one says how his postulated first universe came into existence.
When atheists reject the eternal truth of the Word of God in the Bible, we should not be surprised to find that their attempts to find alternative explanations fail to stand the test of time and evaluation by true scientific laws.
Christians who have tried to write the big bang into Genesis have problems. First, of course, it contradicts the Bible (e.g. the big bang has Sun appearing long before Earth; Genesis has Earth created before Sun). Second, all this rethinking and, frankly, confusion, makes one thing quite obvious. Namely, that building a theology of origins on an allegedly ‘assured’ and ‘scientific’ foundation such as the ‘big bang’ idea is in reality building it on shifting sand.
How much better to take Genesis at its face value (as indeed Jesus Christ Himself always did) and build one’s scientific models on the rock of Scripture.
Related Articles
References
- Arising as it does from Edwin Hubble’s deduction that the universe has been expanding ever since its beginning. Return to text.
- One is reminded of Humpty Dumpty’s words in Lewis Carroll’s
book Through the Looking Glass: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty
Dumpty said, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be the master, that’s all.’” Return to text. - Dr Neil Turok currently holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. He has been a colleague of Professor Stephen Hawking for several years. Return to text.
- The cessation of individual existence in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self. Return to text.
Readers’ comments
a) There is no centre and no edge
b) In 2 dimensional terms, every object is moving away from every other object as this 2D space expands
c) If the ant kept travelling in one direction far enough, it could come back to where it began.
The analogy used involves moving everything up one dimension. Thus, our 3D universe is postulated to be on the surface of a 4D sphere (whatever that might mean) so that there is no centre or edge to the universe. This conveniently avoids having us be somewhere near the middle, i.e. in a favoured spot, to explain why everything appears to be rushing away from us on a cosmic scale. (Their answer is that it would look the same from a distant galaxy anywhere in the cosmos).
This philosophical assumption also means that by having no centre, there is no centre of mass/gravity, which would prevent the postulated singularity from expanding in the first place. (If all the mass of the universe in concentrated in one spot, that would be the ultimate black hole from which nothing could escape. But if there is no centre, problem solved, i.e a philosophical assumption is made to avoid a difficulty.
However, recent observations have strongly suggested that there is a centre to the cosmos, and that our galaxy is somewhere near that centre after all. See in-the-middle-of-the-action.
If we say that a clump of matter existed since minus eternity, and then at some 'time' it exploded, we have a philosophical impossibility. If something has remained unchanged for infinite time*, then it can't possibly change at [infinite time plus one minute], because that is still the same time (infinity plus one equals infinity). In other words, if something has not changed over infinite time, then it can never change.
*Infinite time is also an impossible concept for the same reason. Infinite time plus one minute is still infinite time - no advancement. Time must be measured from some finite point if it is to make sense.
1. Eternal God or
2. Eternal matter
- both equally unfruitful to our finite minds.' It is perfectly rational therefore to choose the concept of a transcendent, omnipotent Creator. I see it just as scientifically accurate as believing that 'something came from nothing'.
earth and in a broader sense the way how creation works.But man can only do so if the information are being placed so man can find them.No father put the desire to go to a theme park in his children if there is none.
So when evolutionists searching for where all the 'stuff' was/is coming from and don't realize that those information had to be in preexistence,than their quantum fluctuation equation can be 10m long it is meaningless;and there is a time factor too with the fluctuation but not Billions of years. They look for a 'miraculous thing' now in the nothingness because the evolution in the existential world doesn't work.
So, I don't need Dr. titles and other educational recognition to make a point,the instruction book of the creator is for everyone to understand and says what we need to know and when all creationists would stay firm with God's word what can evolution man do to them?
Then, any rational, thinking person must also accept that the universe could not have come from nothing. That would be totally absurd! Some men are at least honest enough to admit this. Sadly, some are quite dishonest, such as Stephen Hawking, and insist that a fluctation in a quantum vacuum is nothing, when it is not. The universe could not have come from nothing, and whatever it came from could not have come from nothing, etc. on to infinity. Now, as stated, many scientists don't want to admit to infinity, but it is inevitable. No matter how hard anyone tries to deny it, infinity is inevitable. The only intelligent answer is that the existence of the universe brings us back to infinity. I believe the real reason so many do not want to accept infinity is because infinity is an infinite personal being we call God.
This Kaku is a clown ...
Hey Professor would you believe me when I tell you here in Australia once pigs could fly ? There are two holes in front of their nose, one is for the air speed, the other for the air temperature; the tail is the remnant of a propeller and the ears were once the stabilizing wings in front.Is this logical? Now print it as a new finding out of nothing...a perfect nothing.
Also: If everything, matter and energy [even emptiness] where in a singularity from whatever small proportion, where did the energy come from to 'crack' this ball(?) open?
I have to strongly contradict the notion that there is no concept of ‘creation out of nothing’ in the Bible. I think the problem may be that you mean something different from what is usually meant by that term. Perhaps you mean that nothing pre-existed the universe, which obviously is not biblically correct. Hindus may well teach that the universe created itself, or came from nothing at all, I don’t know. But the Bible teaches that God created the universe out of nothing, i.e. nothing in the sense of no pre-existing material substance. Here is the logic (apart from and in addition to such verses as Hebrews 11:3): All things that exist other than God are creations of God, i.e. there is no infinite or eternal matter, since eternality is a divine quality, so this would make something else in addition to God divine. Thus when God first created something, there was no existing ‘something’, so it was created out of nothing. I.e. nothing material. Of course God may have created it out of His own essence, but that is not denied when talking about creation ex nihilo, a fundamental Christian doctrine.
Every other theory has a problem with the definition of nothing, it would seem like they are trying very hard to sell something non-existent as something that exists without honestly admitting that nothing is the non existence of anything, period.
What we are consistently opposed to is Scripture-twisting (and this is not referring to your comments, which don't show that at all) in an effort to have the Bible fit a currently fashionable scenario. (See Sarfati’s classic Refuting Compromise which specifically tackles Rossism, the most popular paradigm for trying to marry the BB and Scripture) In Rossist thought, there is definitely no earth before the sun. This is presumably because no current popular model of a BB origin, AFAIK, incorporates the idea that the earth could exist prior to the sun. So your comments intrigue me, as you seem to be, like us, starting with the assumption that the biblical account is truthful and authoritative. We are not intractably wedded to any models, and would be happy to see a proliferation of creationist models that commence with that axiom if they stand the test of soundness otherwise.
I have checked with the editor-in-chief of our Journal of Creation, Dr Pierre Jerlstroem, and he confirmed that he would welcome your submission of a paper within the published (on creation.com) guidelines, on the understanding that it would then go to knowledgeable peer reviewers as is usual for similar journals. POST-SCRIPT: Randy let us know that his ideas had already been published in the Sixth Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism. CW
Also the article says that the big bang says the sun came before the earth. It says no such thing. Thats the nebular hypothesis not the big bang theory. The big bang only says the universe started out extremely small and hot and then expanded rapidly. Thats all. The big bang heavily implies creation ex nihilo since a singularity is unavoidable.
One can indirectly confirm this by looking at attempts to use the BB as an apologetic for biblical creation (which the commenter might well be sympathetic to, judging from his comments on creation ex nihilo). The most wellknown exponent of this is astrophysicist Hugh Ross. Even though Genesis plainly teaches that the earth was made before the sun, moon and stars, such attempts to marry the BB with Genesis are always compelled to build in a ‘fudge factor’ absent in the text. They are forced to try to claim that the Genesis language is only meant to refer to when the sun and stars ‘appeared’ to a hypothetical observer on Earth.
Such torturing of the text would not be required if it were not for the fact that BB thinking does not permit a lone planet to condense prior to every other body in the cosmos. It is indeed philosophically possible to draw intellectual boundaries and seek to limit one’s definition of the BB to ‘only’ singularity and expansion. But it is about as artificial and unrealistic as when one hears evolutionists say that it’s unfair to critique ideas of astronomical evolution or chemical evolution (origin of life) because Darwin’s theory only applies to how one-celled creatures gave rise to all others. One can seek to isolate aspects of evolution, but those are artificial intellectual constructs that try to evade the reality of evolutionary thinking overall: i.e. grandscale scenarios to seek to explain how all of nature could have created its own order and complexity by means of natural, material, processes and properties alone. In short, to evade the biblical idea of supernatural, fiat creation. The comments by the secular people cited in this article reinforce how unwise it is to try to marry one’s theology to the currently fashionable secular theory, because one is likely to be widowed tomorrow.
Finally, the commenter is correct that 'infinitely old' universes simply don't work. This must be so according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, regardless of whether cosmologies have positive or negative cosmic expansions, or even no expansions at all. If the cosmos were infinitely old, it would have long ago reached the point of heat death, maximum entropy. A cycle of oscillating universes doesn't save the believer in eternal matter for the same reason that a ball bouncing loses available energy with each bounce. I recommend not just Hartnett and Williams' 'Dismantling the Big Bang', but specifically Sarfati's classic 'Refuting Compromise', structured around a refutation of Rossist thinking in general, which it does comprehensively from both a biblical and scientific perspective.
Suffice to say, what you stated is [not] the "Big Bang Theory. Not even close.
There are rational ways to advance your legitimate agenda. THAT was not one of them.
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