Saturday, July 07, 2007

What happened before the Big Bang?

In What happened before the Big Bang? Bad Astronomy Blog reports on a new paper to be published in Nature. The Big Bang theory describes the universe just after the beginning of time but it doesn't say what happens at the initial moment because the math breaks down.

"Martin Bojowald, an assistant professor of physics at Penn State University, may have broken through this barrier for the first time. He is working on a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity, and it combines relativity and quantum mechanics. Using this new math, something amazing happens: at T=0, the volume of the Universe is not zero, and the density is not infinite. In other words, the math still works, even at The Big Moment."

The Penn State announcement has some more details.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If our universe is a cluster of mass (galaxies) expanding like a ballon, coudln't one ask "what's outide our universe?". And if there is a meta-universe outide our own, wouldn't you expect micro-universes inside ours as well? If so what would these masive, ever expanding, new universes look like from the outside?

I guess I'm asking what the inside of a black hole looks like.