INTRODUCTION
The Big Bang origin-of-our-Universe event was not the be-all-and-end-all of things. The Big Bang event was but a minor event in the larger cosmic scheme of things. If the elementary particles that comprise your mind and body could talk, what a tale of eternity they would tell!
THE SETTINGS
Setting Number One - Time is infinite in scope. ‘Once upon a time’; ‘in the beginning’, are two standard openings to the stage setting where ultimately, our Universe, plays its part. Alas, although there was an ‘in the beginning’ to our Universe, ultimately, IMHO there was no such thing as an ultimate ‘in the beginning’ in the broader cosmic context. In the broadest of broadest viewpoints, time stretches infinitely from cosmic horizon to cosmic horizon. Unlike all we know of regarding beginnings or creations, from our Universe, to our Solar System; to Earth; to terrestrial life, down through the ages to us, there is no ultimate beginning; there is no ultimate ending to the broader cosmic setting we find ourselves in. ‘Once upon a time’, should really read, ‘once upon an eternity’.
Setting Number Two – Space is infinite in scope. In the broadest or broadest viewpoints, there’s no such thing as an edge or a border or a boundary. Space stretches infinitely from horizon to horizon. Again, that’s not the case when just considering our Universe, our Solar System, our home planet. But, this infinite space is again part of the overall stage where our Universe acts out a role – along with probably lots of other universe actors.
Let’s call this larger context an infinite cosmic fish tank, and our Universe a fish.
Setting Number Three – There is no shape to the infinite cosmos. Why propose an infinite in space and infinite in time fish tank cosmos or cosmic setting in which to plunk our Universe - where our Universe is one of the fish? Because it does away with those awkward questions of what came before; what comes after; what lies at the farthest reaches? There is no before in the fish tank. There is no after either. There is no farthest away, only something even farther away, ad nauseam. It also does away with the need to define an overall shape to our fish tank cosmos. An infinite volume has no shape!
That said, it must be repeated and made clear that our Universe (a fish in the infinite tank) did have a beginning, and therefore one can legitimately ask what came before. Our Universe does have a finite size and therefore a shape – probably spherical. What defines the (ever expanding) size and shape of our Universe is how far out light (the speediest thing we know of) has been able to travel since our Universe’s creation, some 13.7 billion years ago. That’s the boundary to our Universe. Again, our Universe is probably a sphere, with a radius of 13.7 billion light years (a light year being the distance light travels in one year – which, at 300,000 km per second, is a long way). Or, a diameter of 27.4 billion light years.
Setting Number Four – The laws, relationships, and principles of physics (and ultimately chemistry, etc.) are universal throughout the fish tank cosmos. All the fish may not be of the same species and even those that are of the same species may have differing ages, sizes, sexes, etc. but they are ultimately all fish, subject to the universals that govern all things fish; the cosmic ‘water’ is uniform throughout.
Setting Number Five – Those fishy laws suggest that fish universes, each and every one (assuming more than just our Universe fish is in the infinite tank) are unstable – which real fish are – unstable that is. The same fish on two separate days is not the same fish, any more than you are the same you from one day to the next. You grow, you age, your cells and their components get replaced, etc. Translating to real universes, universes are unstable in that they must evolve; either expand, or contract. If there is one thing they can not be is static and unchanging. So, our infinite cosmic fish tank is a dynamic one. Fish come and go, but the tank is forever.
BEFORE THE BIG BANG: THE BIG CRUNCH
Once upon a time there was this universe, but not our Universe. This universe existed way before our Universe existed. For some reason(s) this universe had sufficient matter/mass and thus gravity to slow down its expansion rate, halt same, and reverse the flow. Slowly, but ever so surely, this universe contracted, grew ever hotter and denser, until, like thousands of cars converging at an ever higher rate of speed, came together at an intersection. You have, in effect, the Big Crunch!
What happens when all the stuff that comprises a universe comes together? Well, what happens when you concentrate a lot of stuff into a small space? You get a Black Hole. There are probably going to be already in existence a lot of Black Holes in this collapsing universe, if our Universe is any guide. So, existing Black Holes will have a feeding frenzy as matter around them gets confined into a smaller and smaller space; Black Holes themselves can merge creating a bigger Black Hole, until finally, all mass will be inside a super Black Hole, the product of smaller Black Holes gobbling up matter and ultimately combining until a super Black Hole is all that remains of that universe. But wait, there’s more!
Think of the mass of an entire universe, all coming together at a single point in space and in time, at velocities that make Formula One racetrack driving look like a snail ploughing through molasses on a frozen winter’s night! This is going to be the Mother of the Mother of the Mother of all collisions. No Hollywood special effects team could want for more! The upshot is going to be, just prior to the finale, the existence, as noted above, of the Mother of all Black Holes. There’s going to be one hell of a massive distortion of space and time, or, space-time. The sheer momentum of such a collision, a Big Crunch, will turn space, or space-time, inside out. All that momentum can’t just come to a screeching halt in a nanosecond. What’s the result of a super collapsing Black Hole? A super massive explosion – a White Hole – a Big Bang.
BETWEEN THE BIG CRUNCH AND THE BIG BANG
Once upon a time there was this brief, but extremely intense transition between another universe’s Big Crunch and our ‘in the beginning’ Big Bang event. I’ve already suggested that pure momentum of this runaway freight train will be, as an analogy, a sock turning inside out. That ‘inside out’ event will be a pretty quick-smart happening. What happens in that brief interval of time has to do with several parameters. One is of course time - how quick – well, quick – probably several seconds to minutes. The other is space – how small – well small. But is small classically small or quantum small? Classically small refers to the minimum size of the Big Crunch vs. the original size of that universe. Classically small could still be a ‘point’ many light seconds/minutes/hours in diameter. Quantum small means a ‘point’ that is within the realm of the quantum – say atomic sized, probably way less. Logic: can you squeeze the contents of an entire universe down to the size of an atom, or elementary particle? Or, perhaps it is more logical to suggest that the ultimate squeeze is somewhat larger. Now ‘larger’ may still be tiny relative to the universe’s original size, but still one hell of a lot bigger than what’s implied by the word ‘quantum’. Yet, cosmologists would have one believe that our Universe started out as ‘quantum small’, not ‘classically small’; that quantum small somehow ruled the roost when our Universe went the way of the Big Bang event – the origin of our Universe. To me, that’s too big an ask to ask.
Any standard cosmology text will tell you about the conditions that existed within nanoseconds of the Big Bang event when the Universe was less than the size of your common cold bacterium. It was very, very super hot. It was very, very super dense. That’s what the equations say (no cosmologist was around at the time to actually observe and measure), but equations are abstractions and Mother Nature doesn’t deal with abstractions. Now both hot and dense are two logical Big Bang environmental parameters just nanoseconds past that event - but what of volume?
One can of course take any contracting object and extrapolate down to where it shrinks to a point of zero dimensions and thus have an infinite density (which therefore would be a Black Hole). But, does that reflect reality? IMHO: not on your Nellie. There must be (well, should be) some ultimate state of matter that when compressed, can’t be compressed any further. It would take an infinite amount of gravitational force to do it and the Universe, any universe, doesn’t possess infinite gravity.
What’s the minimum size our Universe (or any universe in general) could be squeezed down to? If you asked that question to any reasonably educated adult, even a kid, while you’d get a range of answers, gut feeling tells me that – unless they were well versed in cosmology – that that volume wouldn’t be within the range that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Now, it is dangerous to apply common sense when it comes to sussing out nature’s hidden secrets, but I’m now going to throw caution to the wind and applying this common sense dictum – The Universe, any universe, was never, repeat never ever the size that we would describe as microscopic!
Okay, so here we have this universe contracting down, getting hotter and hotter; denser and denser, and smaller and smaller as it slides into the Mother of all Black Holes, and immediately, within nanoseconds (or close to nanoseconds as the actual size allows – maybe seconds, maybe minutes) spew its guts out via a White Hole. Those guts form the contents of our Big Bang Universe. That midpoint – what was the minimum size of that transitional post Black Hole / pre White Hole event? All I’m prepared to say is that it was visible to the naked eye – assuming naked eyes were around 13.7 billion years ago! It was certainly not microscopic!
However, the really real important bit here is that our Big Bang, the product of a previous Big Crunch, happened in pre-existing time and space. The Big Bang did not, repeat, did not, create time and space. The question, ‘what happened before the Big Bang?’ has now a perfectly logical answer. The Big Crunch happened before the Big Bang.
To be continued...
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