According to a common hypothesis, the universe began with the Big Bang. How could the Big Bang arise from nothing and where did the raw materials of the Big Bang come from, and is it possible that the Big Bang came from nothing?

About the Big Bang, one can raise the question of how it could have come from nothing. Usually, for something to exist, the matter is needed. Now the question arises, where did the materials that created the Big Bang come from and what happened to cause them to form? According to physicist Brian Cox:

The last star slowly cools and disappears. With the disappearance of this star, the world will become a void without light, life or meaning.

The disappearance of the last star could be the beginning of an infinitely long dark age. At this time, all the materials have been consumed by the giant black holes, and the black holes themselves will evaporate and disappear one day. The universe continues to expand until there isn’t even a light curve to see, and eventually, all activity will cease. Will the above paragraph become true? Some cosmologists believe in a dark and cold past universe that is similar to the distant future universe and that this universe could be the origin of our Big Bang.

How could the Big Bang arise from nothing

primary substance

But before addressing the above questions, let’s first see how matter (here we mean physical matter) was created. If we are looking for an explanation for the origin of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, we must say that such matter did not exist at the time of the Big Bang or even hundreds and thousands of years after that. We have a detailed understanding of the formation of the first atoms from simpler particles that formed after the universe cooled, and we also know how these atoms later turned into heavier elements inside stars, this understanding does not necessarily answer the question of where the raw materials come from.

Consequently, it is necessary to travel to the distant past. The first particles of stable matter were protons and neutrons made up of the atom’s nucleus. These particles were created exactly one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. Before this, there was no substance at least familiar to us in the world, But physics allows us to go back in time and examine the physical processes that preceded any stable matter.

Thus, we reach an era known as the grand unified epoch. Currently, in the field of theoretical physics, we cannot produce enough energy for experiments and checking the processes of that time; But one of the possible hypotheses is that the physical world at that time was a soup of short-lived fundamental particles, including quarks, which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. At that time, matter and antimatter existed in equal proportions in the universe. Every type of matter particle, including quarks, has a “mirror” counterpart of antimatter, which, despite being similar, differs from it in only one feature. However, matter and antimatter neutralized each other due to the collision. as a result, these particles were continuously produced and destroyed.

But first of all, the question arises, how did these particles come into being? According to the quantum field theory, even a vacuum, which corresponds to empty spacetime, is full of physical activities in the form of energy fluctuations. These oscillations cause the formation of particles that disappear in a short distance after being created. This hypothesis seems more like a mathematical contradiction than a physical reality, but such particles have been seen in many experiments.

so how could the Big Bang arise from nothing? The vacuum state of space-time is turbulent with particles that are continuously produced and destroyed from nothing; But perhaps this whole reality tells us that the quantum vacuum, contrary to its name, is more than nothing. Philosopher David Albert has criticized many accounts of the Big Bang that promise something from nothing.

Consider this question: Where did spacetime itself come from? By asking this question, we can return the time to a period called Planck’s era. A very early period in the universe’s history where even the best physical theories fail. This time occurred one-tenth of a millionth trillionth trillionth trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At this point, space and time were exposed to quantum fluctuations. Physicists usually work separately in quantum mechanics, which governs the world of tiny particles, and general relativity, which applies to massive cosmic scales. But to understand Planck’s age, we need a complete theory like quantum gravity, which is a combination of two theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

There is still no perfect theory about quantum gravity, but efforts such as string theory and ring quantum gravity have been made in this field. In these efforts, ordinary spacetime appears structured like deep ocean surface waves. What we experience as spacetime is the product of quantum processes at deeper microscopic levels, processes that are incomprehensible to us as macroscopic beings. At the Planck time, our normal understanding of spacetime is violated, and as a result, we can no longer depend on our normal understanding of cause and effect. Nevertheless, all selected theories of quantum gravity describe something physical that happened in Planck’s time: the prerequisites of standard space and time; But where do these prerequisites come from?

Cycles of nothing

To answer how something comes from nothing, we must first describe the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of Planck’s time. All attempts to do this have been theoretical. Some of them involve supernatural forces like a designer; But some other possible descriptions in the field of physics include the multiverse, which includes an infinite number of parallel worlds or circular models of the world that are continuously born and reborn.

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Roger Penrose, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2020, proposes one of the most controversial models for the cyclic universe called conformal cyclic cosmology. Penrose proposed this theory based on an intriguing mathematical connection between the small, dense, and hot state of the universe (at the time of the Big Bang) and the expanded, empty, and cold state of the universe (in the distant future). According to Penrose’s fundamental theory, two mathematical situations become the same when they reach their ultimate limits. Although this theory seems counterintuitive, the complete absence of matter must be regulated in such a way as to eventually lead to the appearance of the matter we see in the universe around us.

According to Roger Penrose’s theory, the Big Bang arise from nothing

According to this theory, the Big Bang came from almost nothing. This is the result of nothing in the vacuum of material in the universe that was consumed by black holes and then the black holes themselves evaporated and disappeared into the vacuum. As a result, the entire universe is made of something that, from another physical point of view, is almost nothing to us; But nothing is itself a thing or the physical world, even if this world is empty.

How could the Big Bang arise from nothing? How can a cold and empty universe look like a hot and dense universe from another perspective? The answer lies in a complex mathematical procedure called “homogeneous rescaling”. A geometric transformation is based on which the size of an object changes its shape remains intact.

Penrose shows how the dense cold state and the dense hot state can be related to each other by rescaling them to match each other in terms of spacetime shape. It is hard to say how two shapes can be equal in such a situation while they have different sizes, but Penrose believes that size as a concept prevents finite physical environments from appearing logical.

According to conformal cyclical cosmology, the direction of evolution of the universe moves from old and cold to young and hot: the hot dense state exists because of the cold void state, But this “why” is not familiar. Size is not the only thing that prevents these states from relating: time also acts as an obstacle in this definition. Cold-dense states and hot-dense states are on different time scales. From the point of view of the observer and his time geometry, the cold empty state continues forever, but the hot dense state creates its time course.

The above definition can help in a non-causal way to understand the hot dense state that is produced from the cold void state. Perhaps it would be better to say that the hot dense state emerged from or is grounded in, or implemented by, the cold, empty state. These metaphysical ideas have been widely explored by scientific philosophers, especially in terms of quantum gravity. In this view, the law of normal cause and effect is violated.

Empirical evidence

Conformal cyclical cosmology provides precise and theoretical answers to the question of where the Big Bang came from. But if Penrose’s view is vindicated by future developments in cosmology, we may still not have an answer to this deeper philosophical question: Where does physical reality itself originate? How are whole cyclic systems formed? Finally, we come to the question of why there should always be something instead of nothing, which is one of the biggest metaphysical questions.

But here the main focus is on definitions that are in the field of physics. There are three broad options for the deep question of how cycles or rounds begin. There may also be no physical explanation at all. Or there could be infinite repeating cycles, each of which is a universe with an initial quantum state, and these states are described by properties of the previous universe. Perhaps there is only one single and repeating cycle or universe so that the beginning of the cycle can be described by the characteristics of its end. Both approaches avoid the need for uncaused events, and this is what differentiates them; Because in physics nothing is without a reason.

Penrose also envisions a sequence of new cycle infinities that are somehow related to his interpretation of the quantum theory. In quantum mechanics, the physical system is the result of the superposition of a large number of different states simultaneously, and when we intend to measure it, it chooses one of the states randomly. For Penrose, each cycle consists of random quantum events, each occurring differently. As a result, each cycle is different from the cycles before and after it. This is good news for experimental physicists because it allows the Planck satellite to observe faint traces, or anomalies, in the radiation left over from the Big Bang.

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Penrose and his colleagues believe that these footprints have probably been observed before; For example, the presence of patterns such as radiation caused by massive black holes in the previous universe in Planck data can be included in this category. However, the claimed observations have been challenged by other physicists.

Cosmic background radiation

The point of Penrose’s view is the existence of endless new cycles, But there is a natural way to convert the conformal cycle cosmology from a multicycle to a unicycle form. In this case, physical reality consists of a single cycle around the Big Bang to an infinitely empty state in the distant future, and then forms around the Big Bang again and repeats the same universe.

This second possibility corresponds to another interpretation of quantum mechanics called the many worlds interpretation. According to the many worlds interpretation, whenever we measure a system that is in a superposition state, the measurement does not choose a random state. Rather, the measurement result is just a possibility. A possibility that develops in our world.

The results of other measurements are developed in other universes in the multiverse and are independent of our universe. As a result, no matter how small the probability of something happening, if its chance is non-zero it can happen in the parallel quantum world. As a result, there may be people just like you in other worlds who have won the lottery or caught fire suddenly or been blown away by a storm or all three at the same time.

Some people believe that these parallel worlds can be observed in cosmic data; Just like a seal created by the collision of other worlds with our world. The quantum theory of many universes offers a new twist on Hamdis’s theory of cyclic cosmology, although Penrose disagrees. Our Big Bang may be just a reproduction of a quantum multiverse, which itself contains an infinite number of universes occurring simultaneously. In this way, there is a possibility of anything and this possibility will happen again.

An old legend

Penrose’s view is of great interest to philosophers of science because it can open up new possibilities for describing the Big Bang and take definitions beyond conventional cause and effect. As a result, this example is a good test case for exploring the different ways that physics can describe the world. It also deserves more attention from the community of philosophers.

Penrose’s point of view is also attractive to lovers of legends. In Penrose’s multicycle theory, endless new worlds are promised, born from the ashes of their predecessors. While the single-cycle hypothesis seems to be a reproduction of the ancient hypothesis of Ouroboros or the giant snake. In Norse mythology, a giant serpent named Yormundgand is the child of the wise Loki and the giant Angrobodva. Yurmungand eats his tail and this tail-eating maintains the balance of the world; But the legend of Ouroboros has been documented all over the world, especially in Egypt.

Ouroboros is a magical unicycle world. As a result, according to mythology, it can be said that Ouroboros holds in its belly our world and any other strange and alternative world that quantum physics allows, and at the point where it meets the tail, it is empty, but at the same time it is full of energy flow from a temperature of one hundred thousand It is a million billion trillion degrees Celsius. Even Loki is affected by such a world.

Via: Theconversation