Big Bang bashing boffins ‘Big Bounce’ back to BIRTH OF TIME
The universe before inflation took hold
By Richard Chirgwin
A group of Penn State physicists says the universe we now see could have arisen from a "Big Bounce" rather than a Big Bang.
The new work by Penn State, led by professor Abhay Ashtekar, director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, proposes ways to apply quantum physics "further back in time than ever before – right back to the beginning," the university says in a release.
We have a pretty good idea of the large-scale structures of the universe when it was only a few hundred thousand years old. That comes from studying the fingerprint of the ancient universe that's visible in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), which has been intensely mapped and studied since its discovery in 1964.
However, the CMB – which marked the "inflationary" period of the universe – poses its own much-argued mystery: why isn't it smooth? How did the "lumps" emerge? (And it's a good thing they did, by the way, since galaxies, stars, planets, and people are all a consequence of those lumps).
The nutshell of Ashtekar's proposal is this: if you can apply quantum physics to the structures of the very early universe, it could explain the structures we now see. And that's what Ashtekar's group believes it has done – it's created a paradigm that uses the emerging field of "quantum loop cosmology" to explain how quantum fluctuations might have created the pre-inflationary structures which, after the universe's inflationary phase, formed the kernels for the universe we know see.
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