Scientists tell us they don’t know what existed before the Big Bang, and we may never know; in other words, the Big Bang is an impenetrable barrier blocking our view of what existed before the Big Bang. But I want to argue we can see to the other side, by using logic to deduce what must have existed there, and it might even be possible to confirm our deductions with physical evidence.
Before I lay out my ideas, I want to clear up two things. First, I’m not a physicist, and have no scientific or mathematical credentials whatsoever. So regard me as a lay thinker.
Second, this logical deduction process assumes the universe arose from a kind of spontaneous combustion; but, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m an atheist. My personal religious beliefs really should be irrelevant to this discussion; but, for what it’s worth, I was raised by Christian parents who dragged their children to church with them, so as a result of upbringing and habit, I’m biased in favor of believing in the Christian concept of God. It’s simply that I’m curious and open-minded enough to think about possibilities that don’t depend on a religious explanation of the origin of the universe. That might get me stoned to death in some countries, but I would argue to the end that it doesn’t ipso facto make me an atheist.
Let’s start with nothing, because that’s probably what existed before the universe; and, for the sake of clarity, let’s refer to what existed before the Big Bang as the “pre-universe.” From reading books by authors like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence M. Krauss, and Jim Holt, I know that scientists define “nothing” differently from the popular understanding of the term. To a scientist, “nothing” is a state of existence, somewhat analogous to a mathematician’s concept of “nothing” as a number. Thus, before the universe existed, when there was nothing, what existed was essentially a state of zero. This state may be considered the beginning of the pre-universe.
If this state was perfectly stable, then no change would ever occur, and the state of nothing would persist forever (“forever” being a slippery concept here, because even time wouldn’t exist). But Krauss persuasively argued that nothing is inherently unstable and therefore a universe had to spring into existence; at least, his argument persuaded me. If I had to come up with an explanation, I’d probably take the easier path of reverse-engineering the problem, and argue the fact a universe does exist proves, by application of logic, that the state of nothing when it existed must have been unstable, otherwise we wouldn’t be here talking about it.
Try to visualize a state of nothing in stasis. That’s where we’ll begin. We’ve already deduced this state was unstable, so it follows that something happened — something changed. What seems logical is the first thing to exist after nothing most likely was energy in some form, perhaps light, perhaps heat, or perhaps radiation — my guess is radiation that emitted light and heat, although I’m not sure it matters. Let’s posit that the pre-universe’s existence began with an event arising from nothing’s inherent instability, and that this event consisted of a flicker of energy in the form of radiation. Backing up a bit, before an event can occur, time must exist; so, either time existed all along or an instability-generated event forced time into existence. As suggested by the previous paragraph, I’ve opted for the idea that time did not exist independently of the state of nothing, and therefore is part of the package of something that arose from nothing due to the latter’s inherent instability.
Continuing on, if the pre-universe began with an event, and that event most likely was a flicker of energy that occurred spontaneously, there would necessarily be a first flicker, but this process of creation would not be one of propagation. That is, you don’t need flicker sex to create more flickers. They would occur spontaneously, just like the first one did, and now we’re looking at a pre-universe containing numerous energy flickers winking on and off, somewhat like a field full of fireflies on a summer night. At some point, through some process, some of these energy flickers would convert to matter, and some of that matter would stick around. We know this must be so, logical tells us so, because a physical universe does exist and the physical matter comprising it did come from somewhere. If you absolutely, positively, won’t buy the “spontaneous combustion” theory that many astrophysicists are gravitating toward, even as they also gravitate toward atheism, then by all means interject your intelligent Creator here, and quit reading my article. If that makes you happy, it makes me happy, too.
For the rest of you, as you continue this journey with me, once you have energy changing into matter and hanging around, you now have a pre-universe filled with particles. I won’t try to explain where gravity came from, that’s beyond me, let it suffice that we know gravity exists and we’ll simply assume that it also existed during the pre-universe period, because we couldn’t be here otherwise. So, that’s another one of those “it must have existed, because we’re here” logical deductions. Given a pre-universe containing particles and subject to the law of gravity, the pre-universe could continue to exist in a state of stasis — that is, unchanging — only if the distribution of particles was perfectly even. There could be no uneveness, no matter how slight, because if one particular was even slightly closer to another particle than all the others, gravitational force would attract those particles to each other, and now you have a mass larger than the surrounding masses with a greater gravitational force that would pull in more and more particles, resulting in the accumulation of an ever-larger mass. In all likelihood, there would be many such masses, or areas of particle concentration, in the pre-universe. Some would combine, some would not, so there probably would be numerous localities of concentrated mass.
You really need only one, though, to get a Big Bang; and the Big Bang will come from the one that grows biggest and most concentrated the soonest. Visualize the pre-universe space as a machine that is cranking out energy flickers that turn into physical particles like crazy; and this monster is sucking them in at a prodigious rate. Maybe over a time span of trillions x trillions of years (in our units of measure), but the amount of time involved is immaterial. What happens is that one of these big balls of particles accumulates so much matter, and crushes it so intensely, that eventually the forces become too great and the sucker blows up.
BANG!!! Or, to be technical, Big Bang.
Now here’s where my thinking gets interesting, and possibly original, because I haven’t seen any physicists or anyone else float this idea. So I’m going to look into filing a patent application, not for the money, but so I get the recognition I deserve for dreaming this up.
If the Big Bang was the explosion of a region of space in which there was a great concentration of matter, why did that explosion necessarily have to be surrounded by nothing, and result in space itself expanding at warp speed, as many physicists believe? Why couldn’t the Big Bang have exploded into a surrounding pre-universe that had some matter in it? This assumes, of course, that a lot of matter came into existence that wasn’t drawn into the region that exploded; that is, the pre-universe didn’t completely implode into the singularity that generated the Big Bang. And if we posit that the Big Bang was preceded by a pre-universe, and that other matter existed in the pre-universe, then when the Big Bang blew matter outward from its singularity, some of that matter collided with the other matter in the pre-universe — it must have, there was so much of it. Kind of like two vehicle meeting head-0n on a dark rainy highway. Kaboom!
If we deduce that such particle collisions occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, then perhaps these collisions left signatures in the background cosmic microwave radiation that we could detect if we only looked for them and figured out how to detect them. Perhaps astronomers or physicists have already seen these signatures, but didn’t know what they were, or how to explain them. If such signatures exist, then it is possible to confirm the existence of a pre-universe containing matter into which the Big Bang spewed more matter. I’ll leave that job for people smarter than me, versed in scientific method, and equipped with the proper tools to research the question.
I’m just throwing this out there for whoever wants to pick it up and run with it. Maybe some graduate student in physics will respond by blowing holes in my idea. That would be okay, it wouldn’t hurt my reputation as a physicist, because I’m not a physicist and therefore have no reputation to protect. I’m just a lay thinker playing with logical deducation. But if there’s something to what my mind has imagined, then perhaps I’ve looked through the Big Bang and seen what was on the other side.