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The universe forgets what happened before the big bang

SOME cosmologists think that our universe has been cycling through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. If so, it implies the universe is doomed to repeat the same thing over and over. A new study, however, suggests that with each big bang, the universe mostly forgets its past and starts anew.

The accepted wisdom in modern cosmology is that it is meaningless to ask what came before the big bang. That’s because the big bang is what physicists call a “singularity” – a moment at which the equations of physics break down. “No one is happy with the big bang singularity,” says Martin Bojowald, a theorist at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Bojowald works on loop quantum gravity (LQG) – a theory that seeks to unify the otherwise incompatible theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. In LQG, space-time is made of tiny interconnected loops, each only 10-35 metres across, that form a smooth fabric much like a shirt’s fabric is smooth even though it is woven from separate threads.

Bojowald and his colleagues have run the equations of LQG backwards and shown that they can avoid the singularity. They showed that as the universe collapses, it reaches a point at which it bounces back in a big bang, and the process repeats (New Scientist, 24 April 2006, p 15).

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2...r-nothing/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2...-big-bang/