From Eternity to Here (10 page)

THE BIG BANG

I’ve been casually throwing around the phrase
the Big Bang
. It’s a bit of physics lingo that has long since entered the popular lexicon. But of all the confusing aspects of modern cosmology, probably none has been the subject of more misleading or simply untrue statements—including by professional cosmologists who really should know better—than “the Big Bang.” Let’s take a moment to separate what we know from what we don’t.

The universe is smooth on large scales, and it’s expanding; the space between galaxies is growing. Assuming that the number of atoms in the universe stays the same,
³⁹
matter becomes increasingly dilute as time goes by. Meanwhile, photons get redshifted to longer wavelengths and lower energies, which means that the temperature of the universe decreases. The future of our universe is dilute, cold, and lonely.

Now let’s run the movie backward. If the universe is expanding and cooling now, it was denser and hotter in the past. Generally speaking (apart from some niceties concerning dark energy, more about which later), the force of gravity acts to pull things together. So if we extrapolate the universe backward in time to a state that was denser than it is today, we would expect such an extrapolation to continue to be good; in other words, there’s no reason to expect any sort of “bounce.” The universe should simply have been more and more dense further and further in the past. We might imagine that there would be some moment, only a finite amount of time ago, when the universe was
infinitely
dense—a “singularity.” It’s that hypo thetical singularity that we call “the Big Bang.”

Note that we are referring to the Big Bang as a
moment
in the history of the universe, not as a
place
in space. Just as there is no special point in the current universe that defines a center of the expansion, there is no special point corresponding to “where the Bang happened.” General relativity says that the universe can be squeezed into zero size at the moment of the singularity, but be infinitely big at every moment after the singularity.

So what happened before the Big Bang? Here is where many discussions of modern cosmology run off the rails. You will often read something like the following: “Before the Big Bang, time and space did not exist. The universe did not come into being at some moment in time, because time itself came into being. Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what lies north of the North Pole.”

That all sounds very profound, and it might even be right. But it might not. The truth is, we just don’t know. The rules of general relativity are unambiguous: Given certain kinds of stuff in the universe, there must have been a singularity in the past. But that’s not really an internally consistent conclusion. The singularity itself would be a moment when the curvature of spacetime and the density of matter were infinite, and the rules of general relativity simply would not apply. The correct deduction is not that general relativity predicts a singularity, but that general relativity predicts that the universe evolves into a configuration where general relativity itself breaks down. The theory cannot be considered to be complete; something happens where general relativity predicts singularities, but we don’t know what.

Possibly general relativity is not the correct theory of gravity, at least in the context of the extremely early universe. Most physicists suspect that a quantum theory of gravity, reconciling the framework of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s ideas about curved spacetime, will ultimately be required to make sense of what happens at the very earliest times. So if someone asks you what really happened at the moment of the purported Big Bang, the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know.” Once we have a reliable theoretical framework in which we can ask questions about what happens in the extreme conditions characteristic of the early universe, we should be able to figure out the answer, but we don’t yet have such a theory.

It might be that the universe didn’t exist before the Big Bang, just as conventional general relativity seems to imply. Or it might very well be—as I tend to believe, for reasons that will become clear—that space and time did exist before the Big Bang; what we call the Bang is a kind of transition from one phase to another. Our quest to understand the arrow of time, anchored in the low entropy of the early universe, will ultimately put this issue front and center. I’ll continue to use the phrase “the Big Bang” for “that moment in the history of the very early universe just before conventional cosmology becomes relevant,” whatever that moment might actually be like in a more complete theory, and whether or not there is some kind of singularity or boundary to the universe.

HOT, SMOOTH BEGINNINGS

While we don’t know what happened at the very beginning of the universe, there’s a tremendous amount that we do know about what happened after that. The universe started out in an incredibly hot, dense state. Subsequently, space expanded and matter diluted and cooled, passing through a variety of transitions. A suite of observational evidence indicates that it’s been about 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Even if we don’t claim to know the details of what happened at the earliest moments, it all happened within a very short period of time; most of the history of the universe has occurred long since its mysterious beginnings, so it’s okay to talk about how many years a given event occurred after the Big Bang. This broad-stroke picture is known as the “Big Bang
model
” and is well understood theoretically and supported by mountains of observational data, in contrast with the hypothetical “Big Bang
singularity
,” which remains somewhat mysterious.

Our picture of the early universe is not based simply on theoretical extrapolation; we can use our theories to make testable predictions. For example, when the universe was about 1 minute old, it was a nuclear reactor, fusing protons and neutrons into helium and other light elements in a process known as “primordial nucleosynthesis.” We can observe the abundance of such elements today and obtain spectacular agreement with the predictions of the Big Bang model.

We also observe cosmic microwave background radiation. The early universe was hot as well as dense, and hot things give off radiation. The theory behind night-vision goggles is that human beings (or other warm things) give off infrared radiation that can be detected by an appropriate sensor. The hotter something is, the more energetic (short wavelength, high frequency) is the radiation it emits. The early universe was extremely hot and gave off a lot of energetic radiation.

What is more, the early universe was opaque. It was sufficiently hot that electrons could not stay bound to atomic nuclei, but flew freely through space; photons frequently bounced off the free electrons, so that (had you been around) you wouldn’t have been able to see your hand in front of your face. But eventually the temperature cooled to a point where electrons could get stuck to nuclei and stay there—a process called recombination, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Once that happened, the universe was transparent, so light could travel essentially unimpeded from that moment until today. Of course, it still gets redshifted by the cosmological expansion, so the hot radiation from the period of recombination has been stretched into microwaves, about 1 centimeter in wavelength, reaching a current temperature of 2.7 Kelvin (-270.4 degrees Celsius).

The story of the evolution of the universe according to the Big Bang model (as distinguished from the mysterious moment of the Big Bang itself) therefore makes a strong prediction: Our universe should be suffused with microwave radiation from all directions, a relic from an earlier time when the universe was hot and dense. This radiation was finally detected by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965 at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. And they weren’t even looking for it—they were radio astronomers who became somewhat annoyed at this mysterious background radiation they couldn’t get rid of. Their annoyance was somewhat mollified when they won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
⁴¹
It was the discovery of the microwave background that converted most of the remaining holdouts for the Steady State theory of cosmology (in which the temperature of the universe would be constant through time, and new matter is continually created) over to the Big Bang point of view.

TURNING UP THE CONTRAST KNOB ON THE UNIVERSE

The universe is a simple place. True, it contains complicated things like galaxies and sea otters and federal governments, but if we average out the local idiosyncrasies, on very large scales the universe looks pretty much the same everywhere. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cosmic microwave background. Every direction we look in the sky, we see microwave background radiation that looks exactly like that from an object glowing serenely at some fixed temperature—what physicists call “blackbody” radiation. However, the temperature is ever so slightly different from point to point on the sky; typically, the temperature in one direction differs from that in some other direction by about 1 part in 100,000. These fluctuations are called
anisotropies
—tiny departures from the otherwise perfectly smooth temperature of the background radiation in every direction.

Figure 8:
Temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, as measured by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Dark regions are slightly colder than average, light regions are slightly hotter than average. The differences have been dramatically enhanced for clarity.

These variations in temperature reflect slight differences in the density of matter from place to place in the early universe. Saying that the early universe was smooth is not just a simplifying assumption; it’s a testable hypothesis that is strongly supported by the data. On very large scales, the universe is still smooth today. But the scales have to be pretty large—over 300 million light-years or so. On smaller scales, like the size of a galaxy or the Solar System or your kitchen, the universe is quite lumpy. It wasn’t always like that; at early times, even small scales were very smooth. How did we get here from there?

The answer lies in gravity, which acts to turn up the contrast knob on the universe. In a region that has slightly more matter than average, there is a gravitational force that pulls things together; in regions that are slightly underdense, matter tends to flow outward to the denser regions. By this process—the evolution of structure in the universe—the tiny primordial fluctuations revealed in the microwave background anisotropies grow into the galaxies and structures we see today.

Imagine that we lived in a universe much like our current one, with the same kind of distribution of galaxies and clusters, but that was contracting rather than expanding. Would we expect that the galaxies would smooth out toward the future as the universe contracted, creating a homogeneous plasma such as we see in the past of our real (expanding) universe? Not at all. We would expect the contrast knob to continue to be turned up, even as the universe contracted—black holes and other massive objects would gather matter from the surrounding regions. Growth of structure is an irreversible process that naturally happens toward the future, whether the universe is expanding or contracting: It represents an increase in entropy. So the relative smoothness of the early universe, illustrated in the image of the cosmic microwave background, reflects the very low entropy of those early times.

THE UNIVERSE IS NOT STEADY

The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium who had studied at Cambridge and Harvard before eventually earning his doctorate from MIT.
⁴²
(Lemaître, who dubbed the beginning of the universe the “Primeval Atom,” refrained from drawing any theological conclusions from his cosmological model, despite the obvious temptation.)

But there is a curious asymmetry in the Big Bang model, one that should come as no surprise to us by now: the difference between time and space. The idea that matter is smooth on large scales can be elevated into the “Cosmological Principle”: There is no such thing as a special place in the universe. But it seems clear that there is a special
time
in the universe: the moment of the Big Bang.

Some mid-century cosmologists found this stark distinction between smoothness in space and variety in time to be a serious shortcoming of the Big Bang model, so they set about developing an alternative. In 1948, three leading astrophysicists—Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle—suggested the Steady State model of the universe.
⁴³
They based this model on the “Perfect Cosmological Principle”—there is no special place and no special time in the universe. In particular, they suggested that the universe wasn’t any hotter or denser in the past than it is today.