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What if ‘the beginning’ wasn’t ‘the beginning’? What if there was no ‘beginning’? What if the Universe simply is, and always was and always will be? While it sounds like something from the Flat Earth Society that fits in with a more primitive view of the cosmos, a new theory of quantum gravity has revealed that unbelievably this theory could work!
LiveScience spoke with Bruno Bento, a physicist studying the nature of time at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. who said, “Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy,”
In Bento’s work, he has employed the new theory of quantum gravity, also known as causal set theory. In this theory, space and time or space-time are broken down into discrete parts on the assumption that this is the fundamental unit of space-time. Bento and those working alongside him are using the causal-set concept in order to explore the earliest moments of the Universe. But curiously they found that under this theory it’s possible that the universe actually had no ‘beginning’ but rather has always existed into an infinite past and “only recently evolved into what we call the Big Bang.”
It’s All Relative Until It Isn’t, At Least In Theory
General relativity, one of the most famous and well-known theories in physics is flush with problems. There are specifically two concepts that absolutely shatter the math: the center of a black hole and, of course: the beginning of the Universe. Both are theorized to be “singularities”, quantum gravity or causal set theory may provide the solution for the age-old Einsteinian problem.
The theory revolves around considering space-time as a series of “chunks” or “atoms” of space-time, which would create a hard and fast limitation on how close together events can be in space and time, ensuring that they cannot overlap.
Bento described how, “A huge part of the causal set philosophy is that the passage of time is something physical, that it should not be attributed to some emergent sort of illusion or to something that happens inside our brains that makes us think time passes; this passing is, in itself, a manifestation of the physical theory,” Bento said. “So, in causal set theory, a causal set will grow one ‘atom’ at a time and get bigger and bigger.”
In effect, causal set theory forces relativity to work, because a singularity cannot exist. If a singularity cannot exist, nor can the big bang. Under the causal set theory or quantum gravity, in which new “atoms” of space-time are constantly created: the Universe has ALWAYS existed and time is merely an observable variable.
As LiveScience writes,
“Their work implies that the universe may have had no beginning — that it has simply always existed. What we perceive as the Big Bang may have been just a particular moment in the evolution of this always-existing causal set, not a true beginning.”
Scientific American also concluded that Quantum Gravity could also explain Dark Energy and therefore explain the Universe’s strangely accelerating rate of expansion, the wrote,
“In the study Oriti and his co-author Xiankai Pang, both at the University of Munich in Germany, focused first on developing a new quantum gravity model by trying to better understand the force’s properties at the microscopic level. “Once having constructed our new model,” Oriti says, “we decided to track it through time from the beginning of our modeled universe, to see what would happen during the evolution of its expansion. We were definitely surprised when we saw something closely resembling dark energy. The model produced an acceleration of the expansion of the universe at the stage corresponding to the time we are at today, which matches very closely with current observational evidence.”
It truly is a fascinating theory that could align to illuminate a number of unanswered questions in astrophysics and cosmology. Only time, or potentially space-time will tell.
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