When someone asks what the beginning of the universe was, is the Big Bang the first answer that comes to your mind?
So be aware that some scientists question that this was the beginning of it all — and that there is even a young researcher who goes even further and claims that maybe there wasn’t even the beginning of it all.
This is Bruno Bento, Portuguese researcher at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK. Bento is co-author of an academic article entitled If time had no beginning (“If time had no beginning”, in free translation), which is still being reviewed by other experts.
His theory is different from our traditional concept of the passage of time. He proposes the existence of an infinite past and considers the Big Bang just one more event in the history of the cosmos, which has always existed.
What does Bento’s proposal consist of and how does it challenge what we know about the evolution of the universe?
beyond uniqueness
Modern physics presents two theories that help us explain the universe.
On one side is quantum mechanics, which describes subatomic particles and interactions. And, on the other, there is general relativity, which serves to explain very well the gravity that governs everything that happens in the macroscopic world.
The theory of general relativity takes us back to 13.8 billion years ago, in the instants immediately following the Big Bang, when everything existed on tiny scales.
But Einstein’s theory fails when it tries to explain what happened at the exact moment of the Big Bang or what happened before that moment. This is what specialists call “singularity”, that is, the point at which the theory of relativity is no longer able to explain what happened.
At this singularity, matter is so compressed that gravity becomes extremely strong on subatomic scales. It would then take a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity to explain what happened during this singularity and before it occurred.
This theory is already called by scientists the quantum theory of gravity. In it, gravity can be explained at the quantum level, helping to describe what happens at these scales. This is where Bruno Bento’s proposal comes in.
Atoms of spacetime
In his article, Bruno Bento resorts to causal set theory, which is a quantum gravity approach that argues that spacetime is formed by building blocks, called “spacetime atoms”, which form elements.
In this way, causal set theory solves the question of singularity, since, according to this view, there can be nothing smaller than an atom of spacetime.
“According to causal set theory, what we perceive as the passage of time corresponds to the birth of new elements of the causal set,” Bento told BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish service).
“What we call ‘now’ is the birth of a new element.”
there is no beginning
Bento’s work starts from this idea to propose that causal sets were formed infinitely. Therefore, the Big Bang would not be the beginning of the universe.
For him, there was always something before, that is, the causal sets would be infinite in the past and the Big Bang would be just a specific moment in the evolution of the universe.
“Our work states that if causal sets are the answer, we don’t necessarily have a beginning,” according to Bento.
The challenge proposed by Bruno Bento is to abandon the idea of ”sequence”, in which one element gives way to another.
Instead, he suggests the idea of ”asynchronous transformation”, according to which elements are born in a partial and not total form.
In his article, the researcher recognizes that the idea of ”asynchronous transformation” sounds like a “fanciful riddle” and that “a new type of mathematics is needed to understand the ‘asynchronous transformation’ and its consequences for the nature of time”.
Bento’s work “provides the first steps towards establishing mathematical understanding of the Big Bang and its possible previous history,” astrophysicist Niayesh Afshordi, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, in Canada, who did not participate in it, told BBC News Mundo. work.
Bruno Bento hopes that future experiments can prove the consequences of models like the one proposed by him.
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