Donnerstag, 8. Dezember 2011

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

 The full documentary:  BBC Horizon: What Happened Before the Big Bang?

A bombastic question that immediately caught my eye. This was the title of a BBC documentary that untertook the daunting task of tracking down some of the most famous physicists and posing them this question. The result was a solid documentary that tried to explain to the rest of us, what the world of physics is on the enge of discovering.

As a non-physicist I tried my best to understand some complex details and ideas described in the documenary, because the documentary actually did answer this feat of a question, albeit in 7 different ways.

The beginning of the documentary states that in modern physics there is a division between scientists who beleive that the Big Bang theory is a valid starting point for explaining what happened before the universe began and opponents who beleive that Hubble's theory is outdated and who set out to explain the origin of our Universe in a compeletely new and ''radical'' way.

I will try to summarize what the different ideas were and I would like a reader to try to diverge on the different theories and explain which one is the most accepted today in physics and why. Please take into consideration that I and other readers will have a minimal knowledge of Physics, so the answers need to be kept as simple as possible.

Here are the different versions of what happens before the big bang:

Professo Mitchio Faku: Matter forms from an energy vacume.

Professor Linday: The inflation theory.

Dr. Param: The Universe will collapse upon itself und will ''bounce'' back into existance.

Lee Smolin: The Evolution of the universe. The Universe was born from a black hole, each universe before the other was more 'primitive' than the one that followed. A cycle that combines the theory of evolution and Hubble's Big Bang.

Professor Turok: The Brane Theory.  When two one dimensional 'branes' collide they produce a new Universe.

Professor Penrose: The Universe extinguishes itself into photons, therefore time will cease to exist and out of that a new Universe will arise, thus ''an infinetely large Universe will be the starting point of the next one''.

Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton: The most interesting theory of them all. Can anyone explain it? The documentary was insufficient at stating what her theory was about.

My questions to the Physicists out there:

1) What exactly is a 'Brane'? Is it based on the String theory?
2) Will the discovery of the Higgs-Boson prove one of these theories or something completely different?
3) Are these ''theories'' or just hypotheses based on models, are there any observations to support these theories?
4) What exactly is Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton's theory about?


Do I beleive in the theories presented? The answer is yes, I believe, but I am not convinced. I beleive that one of them holds truth but I will only be convinced, the day there is hard evidence to prove the answer to this question. I beleive because the science behind answering these question is based on 150 years of evidence based observations and experimentation. This is more powerful that any other explenation of how the universe began, than anything out there.

For those who haven't seen the documentary, here is the link:

BBC Horizon: What Happened before the Big Bang?

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