How Did Our Universe Begin?
- Anna Oliva
- Aug 17, 2022
- 2 min read
I suppose everybody, somehow, wonders about their past. The popularity of family trees and DNA tests; and the concern with history and evolution; prove without a doubt that this search for our history is ingrained within human nature. This fascination has fueled the search for our ultimate past. It inspired physicists to search for what happened at the very beginning before the universe was created, going so far back in time to a point in which time didn't even exist.
I was reminded of this mystery while I read The Five Ages of the Universe by Fred Adams, and I started thinking again about what happened just before that first instance. Adams advocates for cosmic inflation, or the theory that the universe expanded very quickly in its beginning and slowed down after the first few moments. He describes a very sudden and violent creation out of a primordial swirling world of particle constituents but has some issues regarding density. Another popular view is that the universe is cyclic. This theory neatly explains that what has happened is what always will happen, the universe expanded from a singularity and contracted back, expanded again, and so forth, and it will keep doing so forever. The theory eliminates the idea of the existence of some other state of being in the initial singularity, but physicists have recently discovered the theory doesn't account for the entropy that would build up over time. Penrose proposes a different idea of a cyclic universe, where the universe expands infinitely every cycle, and this idea hasn't been disproven yet. Maybe this theory is the right one; maybe somebody will find something that completely redefines our knowledge of our universe's past. I can't wait to see what we discover!
Some further reading:
I highly recommend reading The Five Ages of the Universe by Fred Adams to get a basic overview of the universe's evolution.
This article goes into detail about current research on cyclic universes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220809141255.htm
https://physicsworld.com/a/new-evidence-for-cyclic-universe-claimed-by-roger-penrose-and-colleagues/
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