What if the universe had no beginning?
In the beginning, there was … well, maybe there was no beginning. Perhaps our universe has always existed — and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work.
“Reality has so many things that most people would associate with sci-fi or even fantasy,” said Bruno Bento, a physicist who studies the nature of time at the University of Liverpool in the U.K.
In his work, he employed a new theory of quantum gravity, called causal set theory, in which space and time are broken down into discrete chunks of space-time. At some level, there’s a fundamental unit of space-time, according to this theory.
Bento and his collaborators used this causal-set approach to explore the beginning of the universe. They found that it’s possible that the universe had no beginning — that it has always existed into the infinite past and only recently evolved into what we call the Big Bang.
A quantum of gravity
Quantum gravity is perhaps the most frustrating problem facing modern physics. We have two extraordinarily effective theories of the universe: quantum physics and general relativity. Quantum physics has produced a successful description of three of the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force) down to microscopic scales. General relativity, on the other hand, is the most powerful and complete description of gravity ever devised.
But for all its strengths, general relativity is incomplete. In at least two specific places in the universe, the math of general relativity simply breaks down, failing to produce reliable results: in the centers of black holes and at the beginning of the universe. These regions are called “singularities,” which are spots in space-time where our current laws of physics crumble, and they are mathematical warning signs that the theory of general relativity is tripping over itself. Within both of these singularities, gravity becomes incredibly strong at very tiny length scales.
As such, to solve the mysteries of the singularities, physicists need a microscopic description of strong gravity, also called a quantum theory of gravity. There are lots of contenders out there, including string theory and loop quantum gravity.
And there’s another approach that completely rewrites our understanding of space and time.
Causal set theory
In all current theories of physics, space and time are continuous. They form a smooth fabric that underlies all of reality. In such a continuous space-time, two points can be as close to each other in space as possible, and two events can occur as close in time to each other as possible.
But another approach, called causal set theory, reimagines space-time as a series of discrete chunks, or space-time “atoms.” This theory would place strict limits on how close events can be in space and time, since they can’t be any closer than the size of the “atom.”
For instance, if you’re looking at your screen reading this, everything seems smooth and continuous. But if you were to look at the same screen through a magnifying glass, you might see the pixels that divide up the space, and you’d find that it’s impossible to bring two images on your screen closer than a single pixel.
This theory of physics excited Bento. “I was thrilled to find this theory, which not only tries to go as fundamental as possible — being an approach to quantum gravity and actually rethinking the notion of space-time itself — but which also gives a central role to time and what it physically means for time to pass, how physical your past really is and whether the future exists already or not,” Bento told Live Science.
Beginning of time
Causal set theory has important implications for the nature of time.
“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.”
The causal set approach neatly removes the problem of the Big Bang singularity because, in the theory, singularities can’t exist. It’s impossible for matter to compress down to infinitely tiny points — they can get no smaller than the size of a space-time atom.
So without a Big Bang singularity, what does the beginning of our universe look like? That’s where Bento and his collaborator, Stav Zalel, a graduate student at Imperial College London, picked up the thread, exploring what causal set theory has to say about the initial moments of the universe. Their work appears in a paper published Sept. 24 to the preprint database arXiv. (The paper has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.)
The paper examined “whether a beginning must exist in the causal set approach,” Bento said. “In the original causal set formulation and dynamics, classically speaking, a causal set grows from nothing into the universe we see today. In our work instead, there would be no Big Bang as a beginning, as the causal set would be infinite to the past, and so there’s always something before.”
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.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, however. It’s not clear yet if this no-beginning causal approach can allow for physical theories that we can work with to describe the complex evolution of the universe during the Big Bang.
“One can still ask whether this [causal set approach] can be interpreted in a ‘reasonable’ way, or what such dynamics physically means in a broader sense, but we showed that a framework is indeed possible,” Bento said. “So at least mathematically, this can be done.”
In other words, it’s … a beginning.
See more here: livescience.com
Header image: Science News
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Ken Hughes
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At least from this article, it seems we still don’t have any notion of the physical nature of time. It just assumes time will always pass. We’re barking up the wrong tree,……..again!
Mathematics alone cannot solve this problem, it is to blinkered. What are needed are ideas, imagination, logic, and then a little math’.
I’ll send this guy a copy of my book, just on the off chance he might “see” it.
https://uppbooks.com/shop/product/the-binary-universe-a-theory-of-time/
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Herb Rose
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It isn’t reality that seems to be fantasy and science fiction it is the nonsense that physicist call reality.The fundamental driving force producing this expanding delusion (like this article) is the firm belief that what they believe cannot be wrong so new illusions must continuously be created to preserve their delusion of infallibility. There is no “Quantum Physics”. There is no “Force of Gravity”. What they call gravity is just the radiation of the force holding the nucleus together. There is no “time”. Time is just a set of units used to compare change, just as a kilogram or meter are units created to compare matter.
It is the hubris of physicists that cause physics to completely disconnect from reason and reality, which the science was based on.
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T. C. Clark
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Where can we find your book? …Herbphysics?….HerbUniverse?……is it similar to the Electric Universe?
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Artelia
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The Creator has always been and is ETERNAL.
The Creator is love and intelligence. He is logic, science, creativity, mercy, justice, truth, kindness, discipline and self sacrifice. .
He is a unity of three persons, the Father Son and Holy Spirit. They are beyond the laws of science and time.
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You Are Sentenced
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What if you’re souled out and being sent to the abyss for being a betraying souled out piece of shit?
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You Are Sentenced
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I mean, “livescience” has always been souled out worthless garbage.
And from the position of the depths of hell, I ask, what if there is no end?
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You Are Sentenced
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Most of you “adult” morons don’t understand the magnitude of the situation.
Trust me, no matter how much I drink, I’m always sober.
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You Are Sentenced
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I’m tuning that sun adjustment knob to the sort of inverse level. You know, I’ve been REALLY uncomfortable, for far too long.
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Ursula
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The last very evil person I sent to confession killed the priest. So just hurry up and go to the abysss before you do any more damage than you already have. Or pray and ask for a really repentant mind, heart and will.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
In Book III of ‘The Principlia’, Newton concluded (wrote) as translated by Motte: “But hitherto I have been able to discover the cause of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particculat propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force ob bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our seas.”
I pretend to KNOW what both the natural phenomena and the laws referred to by Newton and I find neither being referred in this article. I only read about hypotheses which have been made about TIME as Philosophers, who claim to be SCIENTISTS, as they ponder if there is any REALITY (IF THEY ACTUALLY EXIST AS WE READ HAS BEEN DONE IN THE PAST).
Have a good day, Jerry
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You Are Sentenced
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Hey Jerry, what’s your play, considering you’re a souled out industrialist “freemason” fake?
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You Are Sentenced
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I feel that my surname being half-german is quite an insult, coz germans are retarded, generally. I love to generalize. About germans and jews but mostly how black they will be.
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You Are Sentenced
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Holy shit you guys have no clue.
The “bombs” I’ve set off in the past week…
And because you’re slow, and far away, it takes like days, maybe erven a week for the message to get through.
Hilariously. The message is “Even further than before”.
That’s why people who think they are alive are still in denial. Or in the river. Later.
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You Are Sentenced
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Erven is plural for “my shit”.
Have I told you I have at least 3 oversized blue balls? It comes with the purity.
Seriously.
You Are Sentenced
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https://frank-x.bandcamp.com/album/frank-x-the-project-earth
You’re gonna be supposed to laugh, despite the pain.
You Are Sentenced
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Like, if you listen to “Satan’s Lesson”…
Which is from a long time ago…
There’s that bit round 1:30-2:000 where it’s like “Oh shit…leave at least 6 feet space between each soldier.”
https://frank-x.bandcamp.com/track/satans-lesson
You Are Sentenced
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It’s cool hey? Maybe even colder than you think.
I love that part where she was like “He will slaughter you all…”
War is the safest thing I know.
Doordenker-2
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Where does the stage (space/time), upon which the Universe is staged, come from and when the material Universe ends, will this stage continue to exist?
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very old white guy
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It exists, so it was and is, and we are a brief blip in history.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Very OLD and PSI Readers,
Readers, pay attention to what Very Old writes. I read that Einstein stated: “The only source of knowledge is experience.” Can anyone deny that an older person has had more experience than a younger??? I can!!! For part of this experience is what other people who lived before each of us is what these previous people have experienced and shared with those who followed them.
I have only recently read that Einstein had read what the other physicists, whose names with which we should be familiar of his time and before, who knew there were observed experimental results which could not be explained by the tradition physics of that time.
And I read that Einstein, who could not get a teaching job at any university and was a SIMPLE PATENT CLERK, wrote four (4) Scientific Articles in one year. For which he was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics.
I know that without the experiences of these other physicists, of that time and before, could have never written those 4 articles because Einstein was never an experimentalist.
So, Readers, pay attention to the Very Old White Guy!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
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Dwight
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I find it amusing that the mere possibility of an eventual union of physics with metaphysics, one that we may or may not understand, upsets people. Calm down, folks. The universe will carry on regardless of our understanding of it.
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