Even modern scientists cannot accurately say what happened in the Universe before the Big Bang. There are several hypotheses that open the curtain of secrecy over one of the most complex issues in the universe.
The origin of the material world
Until the 20th century, there were only two theories of the origin of the universe. Religious believers believed that the world was created by God. Scientists, on the contrary, refused to recognize the man-made universe. Physicists and astronomers were supporters of the idea that the cosmos has always existed, the world was static and everything will remain the same as billions of years ago.
However, accelerated scientific progress at the turn of the century has led researchers to have opportunities to study extraterrestrial open spaces. Some of them were the first to try to answer the question of what happened in the Universe before the Big Bang.
Hubble Research
XX century destroyed many theories of past eras. In the vacated place, new hypotheses appeared that explained hitherto incomprehensible secrets. It all started with the fact that scientists have established the fact of the expansion of the universe. This was done by Edwin Hubble. He found that distant galaxies differ in their light from those cosmic clusters that were closer to Earth. The discovery of this pattern formed the basis of Edwin Hubble's expansion law.
The big bang and the origin of the universe were studied when it became clear that all galaxies “run away” from the observer, at whatever point he is. How could this be explained? Once the galaxies move, it means that some energy is pushing them forward. In addition, physicists have calculated that all worlds were once at one point. Due to some shock, they began to move in all directions with unimaginable speed.
This phenomenon is called the Big Bang. And the origin of the universe was explained precisely with the help of the theory of this long-standing event. When did it happen? Physicists determined the speed of movement of galaxies and deduced the formula by which they calculated when the initial “shock” occurred. No one will take the exact numbers, but approximately this phenomenon took place about 15 billion years ago.
The advent of the big bang theory
The fact that all galaxies are sources of light means that a huge amount of energy was released during the Big Bang. It was she who gave birth to the very brightness that the worlds lose in the course of their distance from the epicenter of what happened. The Big Bang theory was first proved by American astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias. They discovered electromagnetic relic radiation, the temperature of which was equal to three degrees on the Kelvin scale (i.e. -270 Celsius). This find confirmed the idea that at first the Universe was extremely hot.
The Big Bang Theory answered many questions posed in the 19th century. However, new ones have now appeared. For example, what happened in the Universe before the Big Bang? Why is it so homogeneous, while with such a huge release of energy the substance must scatter in all directions unevenly? The discoveries of Wilson and Arnaud cast doubt on the classical Euclidean geometry, since it was proved that space has zero curvature.
Inflation theory
New questions posed showed that the modern theory of the emergence of the world is fragmentary and incomplete. However, for a long time it seemed that it would be impossible to move beyond the open in the 60s. And only very recent studies of scientists have allowed to formulate a new important principle for theoretical physics. This was a phenomenon of superfast inflationary expansion of the Universe. It was studied and described using quantum field theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity.
So what was in the universe before the Big Bang? Modern science calls this period "inflation." In the beginning there was only a field that filled all imaginary space. It can be compared with the snow launched down the slope of a snowy mountain. The lump will roll down and increase in size. In the same way, the field changed its structure due to random fluctuations over an unimaginable time.
When a uniform configuration formed, a reaction occurred. It contains the biggest mysteries of the universe. What happened before the Big Bang? An inflationary field that was not at all like current matter. After the reaction, the growth of the universe began. If we continue the analogy with a snowball, then after the first of them other snowballs rolled down, also increasing in size. The moment of the Big Bang in this system can be compared to the second when a huge block collapsed into the abyss and finally collided with the ground. At that moment, a tremendous amount of energy was released. She can’t dry up yet. It is due to the continuation of the reaction from the explosion that our Universe is growing today.
Matter and field
Now the Universe consists of an unimaginable number of stars and other cosmic bodies. This combination of matter exudes enormous energy, which contradicts the physical law of conservation of energy. What is he talking about? The essence of this principle is that over an infinite time the amount of energy in the system remains unchanged. But how can this be combined with our universe, which continues to expand?
Inflationary theory was able to answer this question. It is extremely rare to solve such riddles of the universe. What happened before the Big Bang? Inflationary field. After the emergence of the world in its place came the usual matter to us. However, in addition to it, in the Universe there also exists a gravitational field that has negative energy. The properties of these two entities are opposite. This compensates for the energy emanating from particles, stars, planets and other matter. This relationship also explains why the universe has not yet turned into a black hole.
When the Big Bang just happened, the world was too small for something to collapse in it. Now, when the Universe has expanded, local black holes have appeared on its individual sections. Their gravitational field absorbs everything around. Even light cannot escape from it. Actually because of this, such holes become black.
Expansion of the universe
Even despite the theoretical justification of inflationary theory, it is still unclear what the Universe looked like before the Big Bang. The human imagination cannot imagine this picture. The fact is that the inflationary field is intangible. It cannot be explained by the usual laws of physics.
When the Big Bang occurred, the inflationary field began to expand at a pace that exceeded the speed of light. According to physical indicators, in the Universe there is nothing material that could move faster than this indicator. Light spreads over the existing world with outrageous numbers. The inflation field, however, has spread even faster, precisely because of its intangible nature.
The size of the universe before the Big Bang was microscopic. To measure its current size, mathematicians have to raise numbers to a huge extent. According to the general theory of relativity, an observer inside the material world cannot see what is happening outside. This rule applies to what happened before the Big Bang in the Universe. Photo in textbooks on astronomy can depict only the fiction of artists.
Particles and Antiparticles
The universe has expanded so much that even the light does not have time to get to its most distant corners. At the same time, the inflationary field outside the world continues to exist, although it is inaccessible to a person living in the material world. The expanding Universe cools as it grows. The radiation temperature drops due to the fact that the wavelength becomes longer, which means that more energy needs to be spent on it.
The state of the universe before the Big Bang was homogeneous. But when it began to expand, new elements and particles appeared in it. These are quarks, neutrons, protons, electrons and photons. There are also antiparticles, the number of which cannot be equal to the number of ordinary particles. If this identity took place, then the whole Universe would itself be destroyed.
Nature has done everything necessary so that the number of particles is slightly larger than the number of antiparticles. Thanks to this correlation, the material world exists. Relic radiation, which continues to propagate through the expanses of the Universe, arose precisely as a result of the mutual destruction of some particles and antiparticles. In the scientific vocabulary, this process is called annihilation. With time, the energy of the CMB decreases. Now it is about ten thousand times smaller than the corresponding indicator of elementary massive particles.
The rise of physical laws
When the age of the Universe reached one minute, neutrons and protons began to unite in helium, tritium and deuterium. These were the first substances that arose in the material world. The synthesis process was due to nuclear reactions. In the 20th century, physicists studied this phenomenon and even learned to tame it. Since a colossal amount of energy is released during a nuclear reaction, mankind has adapted this process to its economic needs. Nuclear power plants appeared. Today they energize thousands of cities.
A nuclear reaction has also been used as a weapon. At the end of World War II, the Americans first dropped atomic bombs on Japan. The death rate of the blow was precisely in the huge release of energy. But the indicators recorded in Hiroshima are negligible compared to those processes that took place in the first minutes of the existence of the material world.
Thanks to the fact that modern scientists already know a lot about the nuclear reaction used in the economy and in war, researchers were able to reconstruct an approximate picture of what the Universe was like before the Big Bang. Using mathematical calculations, it was calculated how many elements and which appeared in the first minutes after the start of the reaction in the inflation field.
Another fact is surprising. All calculations of scientists based on modern indicators of nature turned out to be exactly applicable to the model of the appearance of the Universe. This "coincidence" suggests that the laws of physics began to act immediately after the appearance of the material world. Since then, all the immutable formulas have never changed. They are acting now. So, for example, we can say about Einstein's theory of relativity. The indisputability of laws facilitates the work of scientists trying to understand what happened before the Big Bang in the Universe.
The emergence of galaxies
Using the Big Bang theory, scientists were able to explain the emergence of galaxies. When the world first appeared, all the distances within it rapidly grew larger. However, in some places this process took on special forms. This was due to the fact that in different spatial points, the energy density had excellent indicators.
Because of this, more particles have accumulated in some parts of one large Universe. This process has been described in detail by American scientists of the XX century. In popular science form, the theory was explained in the series of films “The Universe before the Big Bang.” In the wake of mystery. ”
In areas with a higher energy density, the temperature fluctuated noticeably. This phenomenon was a sign of the compression of matter by the gravitational field. The inflation period spawned areas with a higher density. After the emergence of the Universe, the gravitational field affected these areas with increased intensity. It was here that galaxies originated - clusters of stars around which planets formed. Our Earth fully fits into this system. It revolves around its own star (the Sun) and enters the Milky Way galaxy.
The current state of the universe
The current period of the evolution of the universe is the best suited for the existence of life. Scientists find it difficult to determine how long this time period will last. But if anyone undertook such calculations, then the resulting figures were by no means less than hundreds of billions of years. For one human life, such a segment is so large that even in mathematical terms it has to be written down using degrees. The present has been studied much better than the background of the universe. What happened before the Big Bang, in any case, will remain only the subject of theoretical research and bold calculations.
In the material world, even time remains a relative value. For example, quasars (a type of astronomical objects), existing at a distance of 14 billion light years from Earth, lag behind our usual “now” by those same 14 billion light years. This time gap is enormous. It is difficult to determine even mathematically, not to mention the fact that clearly imagining this with the help of the human imagination (even the most ardent) is simply impossible.
Modern science can theoretically explain to itself the whole life of our material world, starting from the first fractions of a second of its existence, when the Big Bang just happened. The full history of the universe is still being supplemented. Astronomers discover new amazing facts with the help of modernized and improved research equipment (telescopes, laboratories, etc.).
However, there are still not understood phenomena. Such a white spot, for example, is dark matter and its dark energy. The essence of this hidden mass continues to excite the consciousness of the most educated and advanced physicists of our time. In addition, there was no single point of view about the reasons why there are still more particles in the Universe than antiparticles. On this occasion, several fundamental theories have been formulated. Some of these models are most popular, but not one of them has been accepted by the international scientific community as an indisputable truth.
On the scale of universal knowledge and the colossal discoveries of the 20th century, these gaps seem very insignificant. But the history of science with enviable regularity shows that the explanation of such "small" facts and phenomena becomes the basis for the whole idea of mankind about discipline as a whole (in this case we are talking about astronomy). Therefore, future generations of scientists will certainly have something to do and what to discover in the field of cognition of the nature of the universe.